The College of New Caledonia is still on the prowl for poop. Bear poop, that is.
Researchers at the College have been collecting bear feces to study the samples, with the main goal of seeing what’s going on with the bears in Prince George, and potentially mitigate conflicts with bears.
“The overall idea of this project is to look at what stressors are impacting urban bears in the City of Prince George,” said Senior Researcher Vanessa Uschenko.
“We’re doing that through fecal analysis, so we’re looking at various hormone indicators in the feces themselves, through that we can look at the sex ratio, so we can determine if they’re male or female, we can look at their metabolites, so how well their body is metabolizing the food that they eat, and we can also look at stress hormones.”
Uschenko said they want to know if urban bears are experiencing more stress than bears in more rural areas. She noted they’re also looking at samples from captive bears at the Calgary Zoo.
The project relies on community participation. In May, the College put out a call for residents to bring bear feces samples to the College, or report them so someone could come gather it.
Uschenko said participation has been strong throughout the project.
“It’s definitely picking up now that the bears are spending more time in town, looking for food,” she explained.
“To date, we have around 53 different locations in the City we’re getting bear scat from, and we have around 105 samples that we’ve collected so far.”
She noted about half of the samples have come from College Heights, with others coming from the Hart, Downtown, and around the Foothills areas.
Uschenko added they’re collecting the samples as long as they’re there.
In terms of analyzing the samples, she said that will be a winter project at the College, with the hope of making a report available in the spring.
“Our hope is to make it a multi-year project, we’re hoping for five years,” she said.
“It depends on funding, community participation, all that kind of stuff.”
PG residents can help by sending a photo of the feces, along with the location to (778)-349-4813, and someone will come collect it.
For residents that want to help and get their hands dirty can collect the poop themselves using a dog poop bag, and drop it off at the designated fridge located by the geodome greenhouse along the stairs by the ATCO trailer at the College’s Prince George campus.
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