Getting Acquainted with Bear Hair

By Chloe Elizabeth-Wood

8/1/18 – 15/1/18

Getting Acquainted with Bear Hair

Last Monday I started at the Applied Conservation Lab at the University of Victoria. The labs are made up of a multidisciplinary team within the geography department with a focus working around the Great Bear Rainforest. The lab frequently partners with First Nations in these areas to apply community driven research.

One of their biggest projects is the bear monitoring work, which has been set up for around 10 years. During the field season each year, thousands of hair snag samples are collected from the territories and sent for genetic and isotope analysis. Helping with this project is what is going to take up the majority of my time here for the coming months.

Stable isotope analysis is basically magic. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how it works. In essence, you take the hair of any animal to look at its isotopic signature and you can work out what it ate whilst that hair was growing. For bears, this means you can see what percentage of the diet is made up of salmon or berries or even how the seasonal diet changes.

I’ve been told that humans too can have stereotypical isotopic signatures. North Americans look like corn, Europeans look like wheat and Japanese people look like super-carnivores due to the high amount of piscivorous fish in the diet.

My first few days here were spent meeting everyone and doing a lot of reading as the samples of bear hair still hadn’t arrived back from the genetics lab. Part of my time here will be spent completing a small personal project so I need to come up with a proposal for that in the next month or so.

Once they did arrive, I was excited to finally get going with the isotope prep. Each hair sample is placed inside a small coin envelope, inside a bigger envelope for each re-visit, and all of those revisits are inside A4 envelopes per site. Sorting through over a thousand samples is going to take a while and then each one needs to be washed and prepped too.

So I got started on the ‘pulling’ stage. The database has all the information for each sample listed for all the years the project has been ongoing. Each sample number can be connected to an individual bear within the database. One individual is searched for on the database so I can find all the samples for one bear in the envelopes and choose the best sample to work with.

Some bears have only one sample from 2017 and some bears seemed to have rubbed themselves against every single bit of barbed wire they can find. The best samples are those that have long, thick and unbroken guard hairs (outer fur) with the hair root intact. The best sample is attached to a fresh envelope and is ready for the washing stage.

It’s a very repetitive task that requires a lot of your attention, but focusing on the bigger picture of the research makes it all worth while.

-Liz