KATHMANDU — Researchers have discovered brown bears in a part of Nepal not previously known to host the species, prompting a call to protect this area as a bear “stronghold.” The finding, based on camera-trap images, also expands the known range of the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in Asia. It could also mark out the Limi Valley, in northwestern Nepal, as a “contact zone” between two subspecies of this apex predator, the researchers write in a newly published study. “The bears weren’t the species we primarily set up the camera traps for,” study lead author Naresh Kusi, from the Himalayan Wolves Project, told Mongabay. As part of their research, Kusi and his project team have since 2021 run a network of 61 camera traps across an area in the Limi Valley that’s half the size of London. Since then, they’ve recorded images of species never before confirmed outside Nepal’s protected areas, such as the steppe polecat (Mustela eversmanii), Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul) and Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). A brown bear image from a camera trap in Limi valley in western Nepal. Image courtesy of Naresh Kusi This time around, it’s the brown bear — a species found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, but which is so vanishingly rare in Nepal, at an estimated 20 individuals, that it’s considered critically endangered here. Yet Kusi’s team managed to capture dozens of independent images of brown bears in their camera-trapping surveys. “Although we didn’t estimate the size of the population in Limi Valley, based…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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