The enrichment of knowledge about the microstructure of brown bear compact bone tissue

Abstract

Brown bear is a powerful, intelligent and robust beast that hides in the woods of Slovakia. Despite the bear’s intense environmental, geographical and behavior research, a detailed analysis of its bone microstructure is still absent. Therefore, our study aims to analyse the effect of age, sex and body weight on bone parameters in compact bear bone. Qualitative histological observations of compact femoral bone show a high amount of dense Haversian bone tissue in brown bears confirming that this is a mammal with high locomotory capability. Only in 8–9 month old cub lack on the subperiosteal zone lines of arested growth. The histomorphometric analysis reported weak significant alternations in the sizes of Haversian canals. On the contrary, no significant differences in the osteons size were observed among groups. The correlation between osteon and Haversian canal diameters shows that all bears together have a little correlation (r = 0.284). In particular, the greater difference is between cub bears (r = 0.268) and all adult bears together (r = 0.394). Based on the results of our work, we can state that the different locomotor behavior could influence the differences between cubs and adults.

Keywords

• Brown bear
• compact bone
• microstructure
• histomorphometry
• locomotion