Stephen Stringham

• PhD Behavioral & Population Ecology
• CEO at WildWatch (Research, Consulting, and Educational Services)

We have searched literature in Norway and North America trying to find evidence that brown or black bears preyed on Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), despite the fact that these fish spawn in shallow streams, much as Pacific salmon do -- which is where Pacific salmon are highly vulnerable to bears. Does anyone have an explanation why Atlantic salmon are (apparently) not preyed on by bears?

As best I have been able to determine from reading literature, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans have been largely confined to tropical and subtropical forests, at least during the Holocene. Why? Why haven't they adapted to more temperate habitats? Why haven't they diversified as much as monkeys have, for example?

The apparent difficulty apes have swimming could have minimized their movements in some areas (e.g., separating bonobos and chimps in Africa) or different subspecies of orangutan on Borneo and Sumatra) during relatively moist periods; but during drier periods they presumably spread out more broadly, for instance into Europe. But why didn't they thrive in Europe? Why did only humans (Homo erectus etc.) (and yeti?) thrive in temperate and ultimately boreal habitats?

During the Miocene, when warming climate eliminated such forests in much of Africa, and such forests developed in Europe at least as far north as the Alps, followed later by cooling and redevelopment of such forests in Africa, apes occupied those forests. But did they also adapt to any other habitats such as savannas or grasslands? I've read speculation that they ate bark, seeds, and a few other grassland plants, which might have included berries. Any indication that they dug up roots, bulbs, corms or tubers, or hunted rodents?

Thanks

Steve Stringham (bear biologist)

At least some baboon populations have evolved to exploit habitats where climbable trees are scarce -- somewhat as ancient humans must have done, perhaps during a period of the Miocene when forests were disappearing. Are any chimpanzee populations doing the same thing?

Steve Stringham (bear researcher)

Might a physicist colleague indulge an ecologists curiosity?

Inertia has been defined as resistance to acceleration. When a person is accelerated in a vehicle, the person's inertia creates an experience roughly analogous to weight. Hence the question of whether gravity is, in some sense, also resistance to acceleration?

A person's experience of pseudo-gravity in a linearly accelerating vehicle is basically uni-directional, i.e., in the direction opposite to the acceleration. Likewise, the attraction (gravitational acceleration) between two bodies is in some sense along the vector connecting their centers of mass.

However, in a system with many bodies, gravitational acceleration is multi-directional. So we perceive gravitational acceleration as fundamentally different than acceleration in a moving vehicle.

But is that difference an illusion? Are these multiple directions in our normal 3D space actually a single direction in some other dimension? Is gravity resistance to acceleration in this other dimension?

And might that resistance be to the expansion of the universe? Are gravitational vectors in exactly opposite directions to said expansion on spatial scales from the atomic to the galactic?

I have a data set whose scattergram plot approximates the rising (left) side of a normal distribution, before starting to decline on the upper (right) side of the "mean". The formula for a normal distribution includes variance terms (sigma and sigma squared). But the data I need to fit is not a sample; no variance involved. I can replace sigma with some other value, but have no idea how to find a ballpark estimate of said term which can then be used in a non-linear regression. Any suggestions?

Traditionally, research results have been considered “scientific” only if they could be replicated. However, in some fields, readers can seldom replicate one another’s work for pragmatic and economic reasons. In the field of wildlife biology, for example, two separate studies cannot be done on the same study population at the same time, and each population changes over time. Also, populations differ. Furthermore, the expense of repeating some projects would run into the millions of dollars. Nevertheless, colleagues should be able to replicate the analysis of one another’s data. Yet some colleagues refuse to reveal their data. Worse, it has become all too common for analysis to rely on black-box computer models which have not been empirically verified or fully understood. Or analytical methods are described so tersely that replication is impossible. And the authors refuse to answer questions. Problems in a paper often remain undetected during pre-publication peer review. Although some new journals are deferring peer review until post-publication, the efficacy of that is in doubt. Furthermore, no such opportunities exist with most mainstream journals. Once a paper has made it into print, it may be effectively immune to rebuttal, at least within that journal or another forum whose contents are citeable. In the era when all publication was hardcopy and expensive, limiting rebuttal might have been justifiable. But in our own era of electronic publication where length is not an issue, forums allowing debate should be the norm, not the exception. Without such debate, something very fundamental in scientific integrity has been sacrificed – apparently to careerism and good-old-boy politics. This problem is illustrated by the fate of a Letter to the Editor which I submitted to the Journal of Wildlife Management, in response to an article in that journal which contained both internal discrepancies and contradictions with other papers on the same population. The editors declined to publish the Letter. (Detail within my critique was limited by allowable length of such Letters.) That letter, entitled Is Nevada Overharvesting Black Bears? has been separately submitted to Research Gate as an unpublished manuscript. Stephen F. Stringham