There are a million stories behind every animal. Too many to comprehend in fact. This is why, trying to fully understand how an animal exists, is a feat of impossibility. Their livelihoods remain invisible to us, their behaviour alien and the reason why they exist, rests largely in our subconscious. So, let’s look at why saving sun bears is important. How do we know they are important and what stories do we need to tell?
Natural philosophyNatural philosophy concerns itself with the question of 'why' things work [1]. Natural science tries to work out 'how' [1]. Understanding the difference is fundamental to conservation but is largely missing . Natural philosophy has more in kin with ecological wisdom, such as the beliefs, cultures and traditions of first nations peoples all over the world. It embraces an understanding More is geared to answering ‘why’ questions, which generally entail ‘what’ questions (leaving related ‘how’ questions to science).
Stanley Salthe, 2002. Becoming, Being And Passing: Our Myth From Science (the Second Law and Natural
Selection)
Presentation to the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre
How animals like sun bears connect to their environment through myriad touch points with other creatures, great and small, can never be described in full. For the most part these animals are like ghosts. Their behaviour is a shadow of ancestral haunts that have lasted literally millions of years. Their culture is engrained with the forest and as such, they merge into it invisibly. They are as an integral to the trees as leaves are to branches. The forest could not exist without them and this animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More disappears once they are removed. So, even when we catch a ghost, like a sun bear, it offers us no real explanation for their existence. This is one of the many reasons why animals belong in the wild, not in zoos. Arguably, the very act of trying to observe a ghost, makes it more invisible to us.
Sun bears are not the icing on the cake
To some, this might seem high-minded philosophy, but decades of biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More assessment is aimed at evaluating importance in the same way – in the absence of knowledge. Almost every construction development in your lifetime has asked similar questions. But when it comes to wildlife, we’re not very good at believing the answer. This is because we get side-tracked by learning ‘how’ animals matter. By taking animals out of their environment and observing them as ghosts, we turn them into curiosities. We treat them like the icing on the cake.
For the most part, we stumble across wild animals randomly, seeing only fragments of a complex life. It takes evidence and imagination to translate this into a language for our own survival. This is the different story we need to tell. One where the very existence of wildlife is as part of the landscape. It’s about their power to shape entire ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. Without creating a ‘change in human values’ conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More cannot succeed. The longer we leave learning to respect and value the wildlife around us, the harder it will become to secure our own future.
Why do sun bears exist at all?
Sunbears evolved around 6 million years ago and lasted until now, because they were the most likely to surviveDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More. What makes them successful is that they are strong, fastidious and hungry. Sun bears have highly evolved and acute sensory adaptations to respond to a mental map of their territory. They are long-lived animals that nurture their young and teach patterns of movement that aren’t random, but systematic. Bear cubs learn to adapt to changing conditions based on knowledge passed down through generations. In the same way, success has been shown to be based on culture in other animals.
Bears are also large-bodied and disconnected to the land. There is an air-gap between paws and ground, which means unlike trees, they can’t grow roots. Bears have had to develop internal brains and mobility, in order to gather energy. This is what animals are. They are the part of the energy network that enables the transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More, amplificationAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More and concentration of nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More (energy). This is necessary for ecosystems to remain intact. If the world only had plants, things would collapse under the weight of random and excess waste energy. Animals like us couldn’t exist.
The importance of sun bears
Sun bears survive only because they can get just enough sustenance. Perhaps this is the opposite of what we think they need.
Humans live in a world of excess. If we are hungry, we can buy more food than we need to eat (and grow fat and unhealthy). For a bear, this would be a death-sentence. Here is another ecological paradox. Survival often means to struggle, cooperate and compromise, not to excel at the expense of everything else. This fragility makes bears both vulnerable and powerful in equal measure. And this makes sense when you realise they are part of the ecosystem. Bears are a slave to it, and the reason it exists at all.
Sun bears are the smallest bear but they weigh as much as a human yet in their natural habitat, are rarely seen. This also makes them among the least studied of all the world’s bears. But how much do we need to know before we take action to conserve them? What if we look at the importance of bears to human survival? Has this been done? This, in my opinion, is the missing piece in the conservation narrative worldwide. We spend all our time justifying animal conservation for the the species’ sake. In actual fact, all animals (including humans) depend on each other. We are each other’s best hope for the future.
Working in an absence of knowledge
We will never know exactly how sun bears work. Instead, we can look at the scale, magnitude and intensity of their ‘animal impact’. This impact is the contribution they make for free to our lives. It’s the reason for the livelihoods and survival of everyone who relies on tropical rainforest (which is everyone on Earth). If in future we want to recreate systems of food, water, climate and disease control, we will need bears. This makes the work of Dr Wong and everyone at the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, incredibly important. They are literally securing the future of humanity – but only if sun bears are ultimately allowed to roam wild.
‘Wong explained how sun bears are essential to the health of the rainforest. They are forest planters, eating fruit and dispersing seeds throughout their habitat, which keeps the ecosystem healthy. They are forest doctors, feeding on termites that threaten to fell trees if they are not kept in check. They are forest farmers, tilling the soil with their strong claws as they dig for food and enhance the nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More cycle. And they are forest engineers, shaping homes for rainforest creatures …’
Dr Sarah Pye, ‘Saving Sun Bears: One man‘s quest to save a species. (2021)
Magnitude, scale and intensity
#1 The magnitude of sun bear impact
We don’t need to know exactly how much impact a sun bear has. We have enough knowledge already to understand the magnitude, scale and intensity i.e. importance, of sun bears.
One study by Wong et al of wild bears [1], reported home ranges of about 15 km2, give or take 6 km2. More importantly is their pattern of occupation. Sun bears, like most wild animals from song thrushes to wolves, have largely non-over-lapping territories. Meaning in primary / core habitat, they can occupy almost the entire landscape. Their behaviour means the continuous cultivation of important forest.
The following maps show the approximate percentage of time bears used habitat within their home range over a single season. One would presume that these ‘core’ areas shift each year, as fruits and insect abundance also shift. But on the whole, the bears occupy a discrete area and become experts in knowing that place.
#2 The scale of sun bear impact
How abundant did sun bears use to be? Population estimates aren’t necessary to understand importance. Augeri (2005) [2] states: ‘It should be noted that the reality of population estimates is that they are approximations and the reality of animal distributions is that they are patchy. Very few species or taxa, if any, occupy 100% of their range and have perfectly uniform distributions.’
The historical distribution of sun bears was nonetheless over a massive area of southeast Asia. The core areas of primary rainforest (where bears’ occur at highest density [2]) were all occupied at one time.
But sun bears have had their historic range reduced by over 75%. What remains has seen a 30% reduction in the past 30 years [4]. These days, the vast majority of logging occurs in remaining primary forest, which is almost all core habitat for bears.
What is a healthy population?
The area shown above, including extinct areas, is about 3,750,000 km2. There is now about 650,000 km2 remaining.
According to Augeri [2], the greatest deforestation impacts are in Malaysia and Indonesia. In these two countries, as much as 85% of logging is primary rainforest. This core sun bear habitat could have densities varying from 0.0234 – 0.0416 bears/km2. Even at the most conservative estimate, this should mean about 15,000 bears. But current population estimates are more like 1,000 bears. Some of this reduction can be explained by natural variation but a lot will be disturbance and habitat fragmentation.
Perhaps sun bear numbers used to be five times higher, when all their habitat was intact? Though no-one really knows or will ever know. What we can surmise though, is that remaining forested areas rely heavily on sun bears for forest condition. Any future recreation of fully-functioning systems will fail without them.
The evidence we have for this comes down to how intensely they use the forest. It’s about their critical role in biodiversity processes needed for human survival.
#3 The intensity of sun bear impact
Sun bears can cover 1.5 km each night [1] with that time spent foraging and feeding. If they have intact cultural connection to the forest, their feeding is expected to be optimal. That’s to say, they know where and when to find food. Or, they have the sensory adaptation to search more widely, during natural fluctuations in the environment. They cannot otherwise have survived for 6 million years. This is a level of precision beyond anything human technology can ever engineer. Like all animals, sun bear routines enable them to transfer, amplify and concentrate nutrients and in doing so, build the ecosystems they and many other animals (including humans) need to exist.
Ecosystem engineers
Bears engineer forest both directly e.g. through defecation and seed dispersal, and indirectly e.g. cultivation feeding and creation of disturbance. The latter benefits other animals and the whole food chainA single thread in a food web illustrating the chain of animals that eat each other. At the base of the food chain are small high-energy (fast metabolism) animals and at the other end large low metabolism animals. An example would be whales eating krill that eat plankton that eat algae. Or lions that eat gazelles that eat grass. More. Over the course of a year, they might walk 550 km, or the equivalent of half the width of Borneo. Augeri [2] reports that other bears can forage for 20 hours a day at certain times of the year.
During that time, sun bears will break branches, build nests, raid bee hives, shaping the rainforest canopy, mid-storey and forest floor. They will eat all the most abundant fruit, especially figs. They also eat termites, ants, bee honey, larvae, beetles, earthworms, bird eggs, reptiles, small animals, mushrooms, succulents and flowers.
Fruit is their main diet, when they can get it. They use their acute sense of smell to find figs in particular. But sun bears have also been found to consume over a hundred types of fruit and use nearly 800 species of rainforest tree. There is indirect evidence from Wong et al (2002) [6] that bears might consume up to 7% of their body weight per day. That would amount to 2-4 kg of food per day.
How much they eat though, isn’t as important as where and when.
Conservative estimates are that black bears can food over a mile away. If this holds for sun bears, then each bear is ‘sampling’ 1,650 km2 each year. This means bears home in on, and consume the most important food sources, 110 times a year. This is for an average territory size of 15km2. That is a hugely intensive effect. That’s like a market-gardener, continually weeding, watering, fertilising and planting food twice-weekly for a whole year over 15 square kilometres!
While distribution of fruit seeds is critical, these other roles as ecosystem engineers are underestimated. Habitat disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More and nutrient transfer are particularly important. By cleaning up surplus, they maintain the forests’ dynamic. It doesn’t take many sun bears working round-the-clock to hold the entire food chain and forest infrastructure together.
#4 The biodiversity processes created by sun bears
For these reasons, sun bears cannot fail to have significant impact on the functioning of the ecosystem. At any scale, from grassland spiders upwards, ecosystems with predators absorb more carbon. It’s been shown, for instance, that rainforests without large mammals leak nutrients at a greater rate than they can be created. In other words, the entire function of a rainforest’s ecosystem depends on having animals like sun bears, not plants.
While sun bears don’t predate mammal herbivores, they will have an impact on their behaviour. But by jumping the food chain and feeding on fruits, honey and insects, these omnivores are more like baleen whales. They consume abundant food in precisely the right places, so amplifying nutrient processes in a systematic way.
Imagine removing sun bears, what happens to fig wasps and other invertebrates? They become more abundant, putting greater pressure on the system. Humans living in forests might refer to the resulting invertebrate imbalance as a ‘pest.’ This randomisation of effect becomes intolerable, because other animals living among it, can no longer predict where and when to find food.
#5 The ecosystem services provided by sun bears
Bears remedy the risk of ecosystem collapse by maintaining a landscape mosaic of processes. They reduce the risk that the system fluctuates too wildly. This promotes far greater success of other animals, which leads to a diversification of plant life. This maximum production capacity of the forest, reduces waste. It ensures carbon, nitrogen and other essential nutrients, are kept inside the food chain. Simultaneously, the energy doesn’t leak out as dangerous waste, such as dirty rivers, eutrophic wetlands and atmospheric carbon dioxide – all of which harm people and society.
The new narrative we need for sun bear conservation
Sun bears are important because they large, and both herbivore and predator. The complexity of their connection to biodiversity processes can only be imagined. It must be enormous due to the magnitude, scale and intensity of their impact. They are critical for the past, present and future of humanity.
Everyone from shareholders to work forces and their families, who depend on the forest soil for anything, be it hunting or logging, needs to understand this. Bears created the conditions that made it possible for humanity to succeed. Without bears in future, humanity will fail.
For this to start to happen though, conservation scientists also need to reframe their own understanding. This is perhaps one of the reasons why authorities leap to removing bears from the wild. We perpetuate the myth that bears are a ghost, the icing on the cake, surplus to requirements. When in actual fact they need to be wild, to remain part of the fabric of our landscape and society.
Animals are not randomly distributed
Augeri’s work [2] is wonderful, rigorous and comprehensive. But like much conservation science, it’s an example where an important piece of context is overlooked. This is so important I think, that the bears’ survival depends on it.
Augeri says ‘Although occupied bear habitat in contiguous undisturbed forest is relatively “patchy”, this secure continuous forest facilitates the bears’ capacity and behavioral choices to move between good micro-habitat sites and access valuable resources across a continuous forested landscape over seasons and years.’
This assumes that the bears rely on the forest condition, as if this is something that was created in advance, in order for the bears to be present. This is why Augeri finds bears are ‘randomly’ distributed within forest. That can only be the case, if they are separate to it.
But the bears have practically always been part of the forest. They have shaped the condition of the forest to their needs, and the needs of other animals (including humans). A more ecosystem-relevant way to think of bears (indeed, all animals) is as ecosystem engineers. The forest is systematically created by the bears. The bears’ distribution isn’t random at all.
I wrote a similar piece about orangutans recently. Even the Orangutan Conservancy has this narrative flipped the wrong way around.
Saving sun bears could save us all
In the book ‘Saving Sun Bears‘ Sarah Pye quotes film-maker Chris Morgan of BearTrek. Chris says ‘Save the eight bear species, and you are basically saving a third of the world’s land surface area.’
Indeed, bears are two of the top-twenty species scientists think could save the planet’s ecosystems [5]. Sun bears aren’t on the list but then neither of the bears listed occur in southeast Asia. At a regional scale, sun bears are equally critical for the people who live there.
So, when Augeri says, ‘tree species diversity, forage abundance, mature stand traits, and cover were the most important variables associated with 97% of bear habitat use’, what does this really mean?
It means bears are helping create 97% of the forest structure where they live. Not depending on it, but engineering it.
The ecosystem we are part of, the one we depend on for its life support and delivers water, food and clean air just when we need it, will collapse without bears.
This is why saving sun bears is important.
Support the Borneo Sun Bear Conservation Centre
References
- Wong, Siew Te & Servheen, Christopher & Ambu, Laurentius. (2004). Home range, movement and activity patterns, and bedding sites of Malayan sun bears Helarctos malayanus in the Rainforest of Borneo. Biological Conservation. 119. 169-181. 10.1016/j.biocon.2003.10.029.
- Augeri, D. (2005). On the biogeographic ecology of the Malayan sun bear.
- Kunde, Miriam & Martins, Renata & Premier, Joseph & Fickel, Joerns & Förster, Daniel. (2020). Population and landscape genetic analysis of the Malayan sun bear Helarctos malayanus. Conservation Genetics. 21. 10.1007/s10592-019-01233-w.
- Scotson, Lorraine & Fredriksson, Gabriella & Ngoprasert, Dusit & Wong, Wai-Ming & Fieberg, John. (2017). Projecting range-wide sun bear population trends using tree cover and camera-trap bycatch data. PLOS ONE. 12. 10.1371/journal.pone.0185336.
- Vynne, C., Gosling, J., Maney, C., Dinerstein, E., Lee, A.T.L., Burgess, N.D., Fernández, N., Fernando, S., Jhala, H., Jhala, Y., Noss, R.F., Proctor, M.F., Schipper, J., González-Maya, J.F., Joshi, A.R., Olson, D., Ripple, W.J. and Svenning, J.-C. (2022), An ecoregion-based approach to restoring the world’s intact large mammal assemblages. Ecography, 2022:. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.06098
- Wong, Siew Te & Servheen, Christopher & AMBU, LAURENTIUS. (2002). Food habits of Malayan sun bears in lowland tropical forests in Borneo. Ursus. 13.
