SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : CLAWS OUT

 

Hungry tiger discovers tangling with a sloth bear is no picnic. In North America, full grown bears are seldom forced to fight predators for their lives.

But things are different for the sloth bear of the Indian subcontinent. The animals go head-to-head with some of the fiercest predators of all : tigers.

While the big cats are fearsome, they don't find prey in the sloth bears, which are the size of a small black bear.

For study in the journal Ecology and Evolution, researchers showed that tiger's in India's national parks easily sneak up on sloth bears, which often seem blissfully unaware that they are at risk of becoming cat food. But once the tiger strikes, the bears often manage to put the fearsome felines on the back paw.

Sloth bears mostly eat termites, ants and fruit and are not themselves predatory, but they have a fierce reputation among people who share their habitats - reports suggest they are even responsible for more attacks on people than any other large carnivore.

Thomas Sharp, a wildlife ecologist with WildLife SOS, an organization that works to conserve Indian wildlife, and an author of the study, has been asking local people why sloth bears are so aggressive since he started studying them 20 years ago.

'' The answer I always got from people was, It's because they fight with tigers,'' he said.

Attacks on humans commonly occur when a sloth bear is startled at close range, just as with the tigers.  The bears also end to stand up, swat and charge in a similar way.

Mr. Sharp believes that it's possible that sloth bears evolved an aversion of surprises from tigers that humans sometimes get caught in the cross hairs.

The World Students Society thanks Andrew Chapman.