Brown bears on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are switching to a vegetarian diet of elderberries in preference to salmon because the warmer temperatures are ripening the fruit earlier in the year. Normally the bears would eat up to 75 per cent of the salmon that swim up the rivers to spawn up until about late August. And, when this plentiful supply of protein started to dry up, the bears would switch to the elderberries that usually come into fruit in late August or early September.

On an Alaskan island, one of nature’s greatest spectacles is shutting down, as brown bears abandon fish in favor of a surprising alternative.

When Kodiak Island's elderberries started ripening earlier, its iconic bears changed their diet. It's another ecological shift amid climate change, scientists say.

Lack of food means bears cannot hibernate, and die of starvation and cold, with logging blamed for the lack of nuts and acorns.

The habitat overlap of polar bears and their main prey, ringed seals, is disappearing and the bears are instead getting closer to nesting birds.