Sammendrag
1. Research on mating systems and reproductive strategies is valuable for providing ethological knowledge, important for the management and conservation of a species, and in a broader sense, important for biodiversity conservation.
2. We reviewed the literature to document the mating system of the brown bear
Ursus arctos. We determined that many aspects of the reproduction of the brown
bear remain unclear, including (i) biological aspects, such as hormone and oestrous
cycling, sperm competition, mate choice, sexually selected infanticide, etc. and (ii)
human impacts on the mating system, occurring when humans alter population size
and structure, through, for example, hunting or habitat degradation.
3. We considered three mating system classification frameworks from the literature
(Emlen & Oring 1977, Clutton-Brock 1989, Shuster & Wade 2003) and applied various
brown bear populations to them. We did this (i) to document the plasticity of the
mating system of the brown bear, and (ii) to find commonalities among the reported
mating system classifications in order to provide a general and common classification
of the brown bear’s mating system
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