Stuffed With Sockeye Salmon, ‘Holly’ Wins ‘Fat Bear Week’ Heavyweight Title
Bear 435, “Holly” before and after her pre-hibernation weigh-in. Holly went on to win the final round in Fat Bear Week 2019.
Katmai National Park & Preserve
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Katmai National Park & Preserve
Fat Bear Week 2019 officially ended Tuesday night. And the winner is….
Number 435, or if you prefer a name, Holly.
Fat Bear Week has been an annual event for the past five years in Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwestern Alaska. The idea is to publicize and celebrate the process of bears eating as much as they can to build up crucial fat reserves in advance of winter hibernation.
Park rangers made a game out of the process – a March Madness-style bracket matching bear against bear, each with photos proving girth and inviting the public to vote on the fattest bear in each pair.
The winners move on to the next round; the losers are out.
This year’s championship round pitted Holly against number 775, Lefty.
And in the end, it was no contest.
After 12 hours of online voting, Holly had about 17,500 votes while Lefty had about 3,600.
Katmai Conservancy Media Ranger Naomi Boak says Holly earned her title.
“It was very hard to get a good picture [of Holly] out of the water,” she says, “because she was a submarine for the entire month. She did not stop fishing, except to dig a belly hole big enough for her to sleep in.”
Holly and all of this year’s 12 contestants are coastal brown bears, who forage along the Brooks river. The Alaskan waterway has one of the largest concentrations of sockeye salmon in the world, and the bears there take full advantage.
This year’s week-long competition was a huge success – there was a record total of 187,000 votes cast, more than three times last year’s total.
Along with the novelty and fun of the event, Boak and her fellow Katmai Conservancy media ranger Brooklyn White hope it builds awareness of a natural process and the need to conserve the unique wilderness area of the Brooks River.
“Not all bears have this same kind of access to these salmon resources,” White says, “and to an ecosystem that has such clean water.”
White says many ecosystems, even within Katmai, are breaking down, caused by human encroachment to warming temperatures that are putting salmon under “heat duress.”
That was especially true this year, as Alaska endured an unusually dry summer.
“Because of the drought, the salmon were really delayed” in reaching the Brooks River,” Boak says. “[T]hey stayed in small creeks and streams that were very dry.”
She says the bears stayed around those streams because of the easy fishing and didn’t arrive at the Brooks until mid-September. Normally they’re there, gorging on salmon around the first of the month.
Because of the delay, Boak says the fat bears in this year’s competition are still eating and will continue doing so right up until late this month, or early November, when hibernation usually begins.
And when it does, it’s not — as many think — as simple as the animals merely going to sleep.
“[Hibernation] is a reduction in their metabolic rate,” says White, who’s worked on the Brooks River the past four years. “[The bear’s] heart rate lowers, the activity obviously is very minimal and it truly is just their body utilizing that fat to keep this baseline going.”
If the bears don’t have adequate fat stored, some may even die during hibernation, Boak says.
That’s why the fattest bears have the best chance at survival. That means when spring rolls around, they’ll be able to emerge from their dens to continue their life cycle.
And for Holly, it’ll mean emerging as a champion.
How Electric Cars Will Change Driving And The Economy
NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly talks with E&E News reporter David Ferris, who’s part of a team traveling the country in electric cars to learn how the vehicles will change driving as well as the economy.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Six thousand miles through 17 states – now, that would be an ambitious road trip for anyone. It’s an especially ambitious undertaking for the team of reporters who are driving that entire route in electric cars. To explain, we’re joined by the leader of the pack. That’s reporter David Ferris of E&E News, an online news site that covers energy and environmental issues David Ferris, how you doing?
DAVID FERRIS: I’m doing well.
KELLY: Good. So I want to get in just a second to where exactly on this road trip we’ve reached you. But start with the why. What is your team hoping to accomplish with this? It’s a two-month-long road trip, is that right?
FERRIS: It is two months.
KELLY: OK.
FERRIS: Well, we’re in an interesting interval with electric cars. I think they’ve been kind of a geeky science project. And now we know that automakers are devoting billions of dollars to building these cars. And we thought it was the right time to inform ourselves, not just to what it’s like to be in the car, not just to what it’s like to fuel to charge the car but actually how it’s going to affect the whole economy – manufacturing, cities, jobs.
KELLY: So your team began this whole journey in Texas about a month ago. Y’all are tag-teaming as you go. I know…
FERRIS: Exactly.
KELLY: …At first, people started through southern states. Then you turned north. You went through Detroit, which I’m sure was fascinating. And then you took over on Sunday. Where exactly have we found you?
FERRIS: You’re talking to me in Dickinson, N.D. This is the single-hardest leg of the trip because North Dakota has less charging, less fueling infrastructure than any place in the country. And so I’ve been learning some hard lessons about how to manage an electric car when there’s almost no place to fuel.
KELLY: That sounds intriguing. Have you had any close calls where you were stranded on the side of the road?
FERRIS: Yes. So I left Minneapolis on Sunday. And I know I’m not going to make my destination to Fargo when I have to stop in this little town called Fergus Falls. And I know I have enough battery to get there. So I’m going down the road enjoying myself, really windy day, and I’m going along and I’m noticing that the cushion, the difference between how many miles the car tells me I can go and the number of miles I actually need to go, it’s narrowing. So I’m like, maybe, I should ease it off. I’ll go to 65. Night’s falling. It’s raining. And I have no other options because there’s just simply – unless I begged with someone to plug into their dryer outlet, there’s nowhere to charge. And so I finally end up limping off the interstate into this town of Fergus Falls and ease into the brewery, which, it turns out, is one of the only two places to charge.
KELLY: The brewery. Wow. OK.
FERRIS: So I was able to charge there, and since the charging is slow – rats. I had to spend three hours at a brewery on a Saturday night.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: So now you have the challenge of sobering up before you can get back in your charged up car.
FERRIS: I know. I limited myself to only two beers. I was like, keep it under control.
KELLY: Part of what y’all are calculating is how much cleaner electric cars are than gas cars – right? – because electric vehicles say there’s zero emissions. But, of course, the electricity powering them has to be generated, and that results in carbon emissions. What have you found in terms of how much better for the planet these might be?
FERRIS: Well, we’ve been rigorously calculating the carbon emissions of the charging we’re doing, and that has to do with the power mix in that individual state. If that state uses a lot of coal, the emissions are going to be higher. If it’s a state that uses a lot of hydropower or wind or solar, it’s going to be lower. And in either case, it’s still significantly lower emissions than gas, but it does vary a lot.
KELLY: I gather that one of the things you’ve noted as you’ve been doing this drive across North Dakota is signs for electric vehicles that say powered by coal. Explain this.
FERRIS: Yes. The Lignite Energy Council, which is the advocacy group for North Dakota coal, has embraced electric vehicles as a way to create a market for itself in the future. The writing is on the wall that it’s going to get tougher for coal. And they’ve realized that electric vehicles need to charge and that they could be a good market for coal power.
KELLY: That electric cars will drive the market for electricity, obviously, which then helps coal – fascinating.
FERRIS: Yeah.
KELLY: Have you found it requires a different mindset setting out on such an ambitious journey in an electric car?
FERRIS: It definitely requires a different mindset. I travel a lot more slowly. That’s a part of a battery-conservation thing. And when you stop, you need to stop for longer. And when you make those stops, you might stop a place that you didn’t expect. And it’s – I think it’s possible that because electric vehicles take longer to fuel, they could change the pace of travel, make it more relaxed with longer stops. And I think that’s an intriguing option. That’s the part of travelling along in an electric car I’ve really enjoyed.
KELLY: Well, David Ferris, we wish you luck with the many miles still to go.
Thanks for catching us up on the road trip so far.
FERRIS: Absolutely. It’s been fun to talk to you.
KELLY: That is David Ferris, reporter with E&E News and leader of E&E’s Electric Road Trip.
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Some Parts Of Trump’s Executive Order On Medicare Could Lead To Higher Costs
President Trump signed an executive order requiring changes to Medicare on Oct. 3. The order included some ideas that could raise costs for seniors, depending how they’re implemented.
SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
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SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
Vowing to protect Medicare with “every ounce of strength,” President Trump spoke last week to a cheering crowd in Florida. But his executive order released shortly afterward includes provisions that could significantly alter key pillars of the program by making it easier for beneficiaries and doctors to opt out.
The bottom line: The proposed changes might make it a bit simpler to find a doctor who takes new Medicare patients, but it could lead to higher costs for seniors and potentially expose some to surprise medical bills, a problem from which Medicare has traditionally protected consumers.
“Unless these policies are thought through very carefully, the potential for really bad unintended consequences is front and center,” says economist Stephen Zuckerman, vice president for health policy at the Urban Institute.
While the executive order spells out few details, it calls for the removal of “unnecessary barriers” to private contracting, which allows patients and doctors to negotiate their own deals outside of Medicare. It’s an approach long supported by some conservatives, but critics fear it would lead to higher costs for patients. The order also seeks to ease rules that affect beneficiaries who want to opt out of the hospital portion of Medicare, known as Part A.
Both ideas have a long history, with proponents and opponents duking it out since at least 1997, even spawning a tongue-in-cheek legislative proposal that year titled, in part, the “Buck Naked Act.” More on that later.
“For a long time, people who don’t want or don’t like the idea of social insurance have been trying to find ways to opt out of Medicare and doctors have been trying to find a way to opt out of Medicare payment,” says Timothy Jost, emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Virginia.
The specifics will not emerge until the Department of Health and Human Services writes the rules to implement the executive order, which could take six months or longer. In the meantime, here are a few things you should know about the possible Medicare changes.
What are the current rules about what doctors can charge in Medicare?
Right now, the vast majority of physicians agree to accept what Medicare pays them and not charge patients for the rest of the bill, a practice known as balance billing. Physicians (and hospitals) have complained that Medicare doesn’t pay enough, but most participate anyway. Still, there is wiggle room.
Medicare limits balance billing. Physicians can charge patients the difference between their bill and what Medicare allows, but those charges are limited to 9.25% above Medicare’s regular rates. But partly because of the paperwork hassles for all involved, only a small percentage of doctors choose this option.
Alternatively, physicians can “opt out” of Medicare and charge whatever they want. But they can’t change their mind and try to get Medicare payments again for at least two years. Fewer than 1% of the nation’s physicians have currently opted out.
What would the executive order change?
That’s hard to know.
“It could mean a lot of things,” says Joseph Antos at the American Enterprise Institute, including possibly letting seniors make a contract with an individual doctor or buy into something that isn’t traditional Medicare or the current private Medicare Advantage program. “Exactly what that looks like is not so obvious.”
Others say eventual rules might result in lifting the 9.25% cap on the amount doctors can balance-bill some patients. Or the rules around fully “opting out” of Medicare might ease so physicians would not have to divorce themselves from the program or could stay in for some patients, but not others. That could leave some patients liable for the entire bill, which might lead to confusion among Medicare beneficiaries, critics of such a plan suggest.
The result may be that “it opens the door to surprise medical billing if people sign a contract with a doctor without realizing what they’re doing,” says Jost.
Would patients get a bigger choice in physicians?
Proponents say allowing for more private contracts between patients and doctors would encourage doctors to accept more Medicare patients, partly because they could get higher payments. That was one argument made by supporters of several House and Senate bills in 2015 that included direct-contracting provisions. All failed, as did an earlier effort in the late 1990s backed by then-Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who argued such contracting would give seniors more freedom to select doctors.
Then-Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., opposed such direct contracting, arguing that patients had less power in negotiations than doctors. To make that point, he introduced the “No Private Contracts To Be Negotiated When the Patient Is Buck Naked Act of 1997.”
The bill was designed to illustrate how uneven the playing field is by prohibiting the discussion of or signing of private contracts at any time when “the patient is buck naked and the doctor is fully clothed (and conversely, to protect the rights of doctors, when the patient is fully clothed and the doctor is naked).” It, too, failed to pass.
Still, the current executive order might help counter a trend that “more physicians today are not taking new Medicare patients,” says Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
It also might encourage boutique practices that operate outside of Medicare and are accessible primarily to the wealthy, says David Lipschutz, associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy.
“It is both a gift to the industry and to those beneficiaries who are well off,” he says. “It has questionable utility to the rest of us.”
KHN is a nonprofit, editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
