Bear Hunt 2015

Florida Bear Hunt -- Not happening this year.

For those who haven't heard the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commissioners voted yesterday to not have a bear hunt this year. The vote was 4-3 against the hunt. In 2015 the FWC allowed the hunt and 304 bears were killed statewide.

So today I wanted to see if I could look at the bear hunt and population and see what was going on. I retired about a year ago from my career as a statistician so it was good to get back to crunching data. Warning! Thar be numbers ahead.

The bear hunt occurred in 4 of Florida's 7 Bear Management Units, the South, North, East Panhandle, and Central BMUs. The first chart shows the estimated bear population of the BMUs. The figure that jumped out at me was the % increase of bears for the Central BMU was only 19% over the 12 years, or about 1.5% increase per year. That slow rate of population increase hints that the Central BMU has reached its carrying capacity -- the number of healthy bears it can support. The other annual percentage increases were 6.8%, 11.5%, and 4.9% for the East Panhandle, North, and South BMUs respectively. Those sound like they come from growing populations.

Bear Population Growth Rate

But that was an average growth over 11-12 years. What do the hunt numbers tell us about the bears that were killed in 2015? The 2nd graphic shows the statistics on the bears killed by sex and weight. In a population with room to grow I would expect the percentage of females to be slightly higher than that of males because males tend to kill other males when they can, especially in bad times. The South BMU again showed that it seems in good shape with 54% of the bears killed being female. The Central BMU is again the worst with 59% of the bears killed being female. The other 2 fall in between once more.

The last thing to look at is the weight of the bears killed in the hunt. In a normal bear population the male bears should be slightly larger than the females. MYFWC provides the data for this analysis. We see that in the South BMU the average male bear weighs in at 306 lbs and the females at 211 lbs for a ratio of 1.45. Once more a population with room to grow.

The other BMUs show a real problem. In all 3 the bears harvested were much smaller than in the South BMU. That comes from bears that don't have enough to eat. In each of the other BMUs the weight of the male bears ranged between 151 and 190 lbs. The females ranged between 167 and 204 lbs. Both were smaller than in the South BMU, but the males were very small especially in the East Panhandle where they were less than half the size of the males in the South BMU.

Also the females were roughly the same size as the males the last 3 BMUs and in 2 of the 3 the females were actually larger. This tells me that the bears are chronically short of food and the males that aren't killed by other bears are being forced out of their territories to areas that can't support them.

So I can see why the staff biologist recommendation was to continue the hunt with more restrictions. I'm guessing the big restriction would have been to discontinue the hunt in the South BMU since the population has sufficient forage to continue to grow. In the other 3 BMUs the population is hungrier than they would like and more males are being killed by other bears, car strikes and as nuisance bears in their search for food.

I know lots of people have a very emotional response to the idea of a bear hunt. Unfortunately there's not good pictures to show the issue of bears starving. But the numbers are telling me it's a very real issue.

But no to the hunt this year. I will hazard a guess that the case will grow stronger next year as male bears continue to go outside normal ranges in search for food. Also there will be more time to educate the commissioners and the public on the reasons for the hunt.

(This post was originally a facebook post on June 23, 2016. It was reformatted for Blogger).