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[Caroline Fox]:Because I'd grown up on the inside of Vancouver Island near the Parksville Qualicum Spawn, I had a fairly long-term perspective on herring spawns on the coast and how large they were 20 years ago compared to their fairly reduced size now.

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[Caroline Fox]:And so we literally went out to Quatsino Sound where there's a fairly small but still somewhat reliable herring spawn.

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[Caroline Fox]:And we had this idea that terrestrial predators in particular would respond to herring.

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[Caroline Fox]:We had a couple anecdotal observations from coastal fishermen that had seen black bears eat herring eggs.

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[Caroline Fox]:But there had been no documentation in the scientific literature beyond just two observations.

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[Caroline Fox]:there was a almost total lack of knowledge.

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[Caroline Fox]:And so I sat on a beach, freezing, and this is early March with a couple feet of snow in Quetzalcoatl.

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[Caroline Fox]:All the bears were still in their winter hibernation, so they're still in their dens up the sides of hillsides.

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[Caroline Fox]:The spawn happened,

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[Caroline Fox]:And just about three or four days later, the first black bears of the year came out on the beach.

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[Caroline Fox]:And where we work, there's a lot of herring eggs get washed up into the hydrotidal with storm events.

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[Caroline Fox]:So you can have two, three, four, five feet of rotting herring eggs in the hydrotidal.

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[Caroline Fox]:These black bears came out of the woods, lay down on their bellies for the most part.

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[Caroline Fox]:And for several weeks, they gorged on herring eggs.

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[Caroline Fox]:And

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[Caroline Fox]:Some years those relationships weren't very strong when the spawn events were quite poor.

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[Caroline Fox]:But we happened to be quite lucky and captured two spawn events where a fairly significant quantity of herring eggs washed into the beach.

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[Caroline Fox]:And those black bears had food for five weeks off a single spawn event.

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[Caroline Fox]:And so it was an association that we'd never anticipated to be that large nor that long lasting off just one spawn event.