Science on Tap: Audience Leaves Bearing Lots of New Knowledge

How can we learn more about black bear hibernation? That’s one of the questions Brogan Holcombe addressed at the March 27, 2025, Science on Tap event “Fitbits for Black Bears in Virginia?” Holcombe led the audience through trivia about black bear hibernation, diet, and behavior and accompanied the fun facts with adorable bear videos, too. 

    Holcombe, who recently completed a master’s degree in fish and wildlife sciences and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Virginia Tech’s geospatial and environmental analysis program, began by giving the audience a few minutes to fill out some bear trivia quiz sheets for themselves. As she revealed answers in her talk, participants could verify their knowledge. Holcombe began with an overview of black bear hibernation ecology and introduced a new vocabulary word — hyperphagia is the term for when these bears eat lots of food in preparation for hibernation. They need a variety of food sources (missing your bird seed, anyone?) to build up their fat stores to get them through the winter.

    To try to learn what black bears do all day, the lab group Holcombe works with is creating a pseudo-FitBit by using camera collars on the bears. They have used these camera collars to record 15 bears every 20 minutes during daylight hours between May and December. The bear’s-eye-view that these camera collars showed allowed Holcombe to verify the bears’ generalist diet, consisting of 187 unique species including birds, deer, apples and berries, corn, and insects. She even saw that bears will use their claws to accurately pick out the ripest magnolia fruits!

    The bears’ camera collars are also equipped with a tri-axial accelerometer, a sensor that measures movement around three different axes. Holcombe’s research is focused on finding the behaviors that correspond to the accelerometer readings to create a “Fitbit” for black bears. She brought out a diagram to explain how higher readings from the collars correspond to higher levels of movement, such as running. Situating these behaviors within the bear’s location can provide even greater insights and raise questions, too. If a bear is on a recreational trail, are they digging through the trash or just hanging out? Holcombe’s findings can help wildlife managers better understand the activity of bears near human-occupied areas.

    Holcombe fielded a number of questions from the audience. When it comes to a black bear’s weight, the biggest tend to be 250 pounds for females — but this number varies throughout the season, with some male bears reaching 500 pounds. The audience asked Holcombe if the bears awake in the middle of hibernation (they might wake up to drink water a few times), how the “FitBits” are powered (with a battery, which lasts a full 9 to 10 months), and how she weighs the bears (with a spring scale). No matter the trivia score, everyone left a winner with all of their new bear knowledge.

    Once the talk was over,  audience members had fun watching “bear videos” on their cell phones, using QR codes from Holcombe’s poster display. Thank you to Brogan Holcombe for sharing her research story and findings and to Rising Silo Brewery for hosting! Science on Tap is a monthly event sponsored and supported by the Center for Communicating Science and by Virginia Tech's chapter of Sigma Xi. Come out to our next event at 5:30 p.m. June 26, 2025, to hear VT professor of mechanical engineering Kevin Kochersberger speak about unmanned flight surveillance.

By Bria Weisz, Center for Communicating Science graduate assistant