Every day of this week I attempted to find new research material on the possible species I have interest in and subtopics under the theme of animal science. As mentioned in my previous blogs, I would like to focus my research topic on red pandas, brown bears or Andean (spectacled) bears. At the beginning of the week though, after using various internet sources I could not find much research conducted on red pandas, so I decided to eliminate the specie of my list. Now, the remaining species I am interested in are all under the broader category of bears. So that is where I started my research. I remember first opening a Google search tab and just typing “research on bears.” After looking through the search results, I clicked on the header “Current Researcher-The Wildlife Research Institute.” In that page I found the research this institution was working on ranged from social system to play patterns of black bears. Now as I navigated through their website I noticed they had a tab where all their research publication papers could be downloaded. Not only were all the articles on different topics concerning black bears but it listed a couple of researchers involved with bear studies. Out of all the researchers American biologist Lynn Rogers who has been studying wild black bears for decades stood out the most for me. So I proceeded to search him on Google to find more about Dr. Rogers. I found out he is founder of the North American Bear Center, and so decided to click on the project’s website where I also found many information regarding black bears. In fact, when skimming through their black bear communication tab, they had a range of recorded black bear vocalizations that are used to express a variety of messages. Then I decided to dig further on Twitter to see if there was any recent research on bear communication, so I searched bear scents because from the skim reading I did with the previous sources found on Google, I learned bears communicate through not only sounds but scents. All the results pointed to a study conducted by a team of researchers from Poland, Spain and Austria that discovered that brown bear paws contain sweat glands, suggesting that the prints leave behind a scent and thus are used to communicate to other bears. The articles lead me to the original research article published by the Scientific Reports, titled, “Histological, chemical and behavioural evidence of pedal communication in brown bears.” I decided to also see if there was research on other aspects of bear studies, so for this I decided to now look through the Academic Search Complete, a resource provided by the UCI Libraries, where I searched "bear and cognition." Out of all the results I was drawn to an article titled, “Bears ‘count’ too: quantity estimation and comparison in black bears, Ursus americanus,” in which psychologists Jennifer Vonk and Michael Beran conclude that bears have numerical cognitive abilities like other primates. After copying this research article title, I decided to go back to my Google search engine and paste the title and search the full article online. Fortunately, I found the whole study at the PubMed Central a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Besides finding the complete published article on black bear’s numerical cognition, I was suggested other research publication related to bear cognition like “Spatial memory in captive American black bears (Ursus americanus)” and “When top predators become prey: Black bears alter movement behaviour in response to hunting pressure.” Through Google I was later able to find another organization that emphasis is on social behavior, the Brown Bear Research Network a multi-disciplinary group that goal is to fund and facilitate innovative and progressive research on brown (grizzly) bears in British Columbia. Along with finding this informational website, I also came upon more researchers that have spent many years studying bears (specifically brown bears). Every single research publication I mentioned were definitely saved on my Diigo account, because they all contained valuable information concerning bear cognition and communication. Articles or bear organization websites were also saved on my Diigo account, since they contain many names of researchers in the field of bear studies.
Lastly, my list of essential words for further research expanded during this week because I added terms like numerical cognition, social behaviour, Ursus arctos, Ursus americanus, cognition, communication, vocalization, bear biology, and scent communication. While my research this week was still broad I was definitely spending more time searching and searching for research sources through various internet sources!
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March 2018
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