Wildlife officers trapped and killed the biggest Florida black bear on record Sunday in a Longwood neighborhood.
The mammoth animal, which had been roaming Seminole County neighborhoods for more than a month, weighed 740 pounds, according to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission. That’s more than 100 pounds heavier than the previous record-holder, a 620-pound black bear caught in Paisley in 2013.
The Longwood bear most likely did not balloon to 740 pounds by sticking to its staple diet of nuts, berries and sabal-palm hearts. It probably feasted on a cornucopia of curbside garbage, too, said Thomas Eason, a bear biologist and director of FWC’s Division of Habitat & Species Conservation.
Residents had complained for weeks about a large beast with white chest markings that had been wandering through their yards and streets.
Though many people still regard the state’s native black bears as curious, playful critters, frequent conflicts with humans have forced FWC to change its approach in managing the once a threatened species.
The result likely will be more dead bears, Eason said.
The agency’s more aggressive approach follows the mauling of two Seminole County women and a teen-age girl in the Panhandle during the past 13 months, the injury of a 68-year-old woman in Heathrow and the growing number of human-bear encounters.
Wildlife commissioners are set to discuss FWC’s bear-management strategies next month, when they’ll also consider allowing a bear hunt in Florida for the first time since 1994. The agency is studying the bear population, which was estimated at 3,000 animals a decade ago but is believed to have exploded.
The Longwood bear’s fate may be a result of the agency’s new, tougher approach.
“We’ve tried everything else,” Eason said Tuesday, quizzed by the Florida Senate Committee on Agriculture. “We’ve been lenient with bears. We’ve moved them. We’ve left them in neighborhoods. We’ve worked with people to, you know, say you need to do your part.
“We’ve just reached the point where we have so many bears and so many people interacting.”
Wildlife officers set a trap Saturday on Deer Chase Run in Alaqua Lakes for the big bear and baited it with a sock filled with doughnuts and syrup.
The next morning, he was caught.
They then sedated the animal and moved it from the neighborhood before deciding to euthanize it.
“This bear was continually sighted in the neighborhood, did not appear to have fear of people and could therefore pose a human-safety risk,” FWC spokeswoman Susan Smith wrote in an email.
Adult male black bears weigh on average about 250 pounds, though they range between 125 and 600 pounds, according to the American Bear Association. Females are usually smaller, though they can tip the scales at 300 pounds or more. The bears in the Seminole County incidents were smaller females with cubs.
The size of the bear mattered less to FWC than its behavior, said Mike Orlando, the agency’s bear expert in Central Florida.
“We don’t always rush out and capture them just because they’re big,” he said. “No bear — not big ones, little ones or the medium-sized ones — should be comfortable in neighborhoods.”
The previous Florida record-holder had made a nuisance of itself in the Lake County community of Paisley, tearing into livestock pens and rummaging through garbage cans. It was later released in the Ocala National Forest and hasn’t been heard from since, Orlando said.
State Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood, who called the state’s nuisance-bear hotline last month about a group of bears in his Alaqua neighborhood, was stunned to hear of the new record-setter.
“I can’t even picture that,” he said. “It would barely fit in the trap.”
FWC believes the big bear was the same distinctively marked animal that residents in several neighborhoods had seen at all times of the day.
“It had a high presence in the community,” Orlando said. “It did not run or flee from people as it should.”
He said the agency had little option but to euthanize a bear that had demonstrated it was dangerously comfortable around people.
“We don’t want to kill any animal, especially an impressive and majestic animal like that,” Orlando said. “But public safety is paramount.”
Wildlife records in North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states with black bears boast bigger animals, but nearly all were shot by hunters in the wild, not captured in a residential neighborhood.
shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6361.
