Biologists tracking black bears in the Smoky Mountains finally caught something on camera that they say changes everything they understood about the region’s top predator. For years, researchers assumed adult bears had no natural enemies, standing unchallenged at the top of the food chain.
For several years, biologists monitoring black bears in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park noticed a pattern in their data that they could not explain. Subadult male bears, typically two to four years old, were disappearing at rates higher than the baseline data predicted. The known causes of bear mortality in the park, such as vehicle collisions and human conflict, did not account for the lo…