I had nearly forgotten about this photograph of a sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), but it's one of my favorites. Don't let their name or insect-based diet fool you, though; they can move quite quickly and are can be very dangerous to encounter. This is not because they are especially aggressive, but rather because they usually cannot see or hear humans until they are nearly on top of the bear, at which point the bear may attack in defense. Such facts don't mean much if you stumble into a sloth bear on a dark night, though, and according to at least one study there were as many as 735 sloth bear incidents within a five-year period.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Sloth Bear (Melursus ursinus) is quite unusual, indeed; up until two years ago I had never even heard of this nocturnal bear from India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It is a bit mysterious why this bear is called the "Sloth Bear," however, although it does resemble anteaters (another member of the…
A large number of criminal shootings are
"drive-bys" --- fired from long range and more likely to hit an
extremity than a self-defence shooting at close range. These factors
suggest that defensive shootings would be more lethal than criminal ones.
John Briggs writes:
Any data on the proportions…
I was contemplating how to get back into the swing of things as far as getting the blogging juices flowing again after the unfortunate events of the last few days, given how much my last post drained me. I suppose I could have dived into the infamous PZ versus the cracker incident, but, quite…
Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like…