The moon bear is the most upright walker in the whole bear family
Named for the pale crescent on its chest, the Asian black bear can stroll on its hind legs for more than 400 metres, farther than any other bear. Its upper body is so strong that individuals with broken hind legs have still climbed effectively, a sign of how thoroughly this species has taken to the trees.
Also called the moon bear or white-chested bear, it wears black fur, a light brown muzzle and a creamy chest patch that is sometimes shaped like a V. Its bell-shaped ears are long for a bear and stick out sideways. Adults stand 70 to 100 centimetres at the shoulder, and males average about 135 kilograms. Compared with the brown bear it is lighter, with more mobile lips and nose, weak hind legs and a powerful upper body, and its hooked front claws help it dig and climb. Its senses are sharper than a brown bear's, though its eyesight is poor.
Its lineage runs deep. The species is regarded as the least specialised of the Old World bears, and its bones can be hard to tell apart from those of Ursus minimus, which appeared 4 million years ago. It probably split from the American black bear about 3 million years ago, and Japan's population may have separated when bears crossed a land bridge from Korea some 500,000 years ago. Until the Late Pleistocene, subspecies roamed Europe as far west as Iberia. It can also interbreed with other bears: a 1975 pairing with a spectacled bear in a Venezuelan zoo produced several hybrids.
Today it lives patchily from southeastern Iran through the Himalayas and mainland Southeast Asia to China, Taiwan, the Russian Far East and Japan's Honshu and Shikoku. It favours deciduous and mixed forest, spending summers around 3,500 metres in the Himalayas and descending below 1,500 metres in winter.
Listed as vulnerable, it suffers from deforestation and poaching for parts used in traditional medicine, and reliable population counts are rare. Recoveries do happen. Japan's estimate rose from about 15,000 in 2012 to roughly 44,000 in 2023 as protection grew and hunters aged, and South Korea, whose bears had vanished by the 1990s, began reintroducing them at Jiri Mountain in 2004.
Source: Asian black bear
