I used to think sun bears were just smaller, scruffier versions of their northern cousins—until I watched a mother teach her cub how to tear apart a termite mound in Borneo.
The thing about sun bears is that they’re teaching their young a skill set that’s frankly bewildering in its complexity. These cubs need to learn not just where to find food, but how to extract it from some of the most stubbornly defended fortresses in the rainforest. A termite mound isn’t just sitting there waiting to be eaten—it’s a concrete-hard structure that requires specific techniques to crack open. The mother bear I observed spent nearly twenty minutes demonstrating the proper angle to insert her claws, how much force to apply, and crucially, which parts of the mound to avoid because they’re crawling with soldier termites whose bites can recieve even through thick fur. She’d pause, let her cub try, then gently—well, relatively gently—push the cub aside to show the technique again. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t fast. But it was deliberate.
Turns out, this kind of teaching behavior is rarer in the animal kingdom than you’d think. Most mammals rely on observational learning, where offspring just watch and figure it out. Active instruction—where a parent modifies their behavior specifically to facilitate learning—that’s a different thing entirely.
When Foraging Becomes a Multi-Year Curriculum in the Canopy
Here’s the thing: sun bear cubs stay with their mothers for roughly two to three years, give or take, and during that time they’re essentially enrolled in a comprehensive foraging bootcamp. The curriculum includes identifying which fig trees are fruiting (by smell, from a distance that seems impossible), understanding the seasonal availability of different food sources, and mastering the art of opening bee hives without getting stung to death. That last one is particularly impressive because sun bears have this absurdly long tongue—nearly ten inches—that they use to extract honey and larvae from deep inside hives. But knowing you have a long tongue doesn’t automatically mean you know how to use it effectively while angry bees are swarming your face.
Researchers in Southeast Asia have documented mothers actively slowing down their foraging to allow cubs to keep up and observe. They’ll spend extra time at a food source, demonstrating techniques repeatedly.
I guess what surprised me most was the patience involved. Biologist Siew Te Wong spent years studying sun bears in Malaysian Borneo and noted that mothers would sometimes return to the same teaching sites—specific trees or termite mounds—multiple times over weeks, as if running through lesson plans. The cubs weren’t always enthusiastic students, either. Some would wander off, get distracted by butterflies or their own paws, and the mother would have to physically retrieve them and redirect their attention. It’s messy and honestly kind of exhausting to watch, because you realize how much energy goes into transferring knowledge that we take for granted.
The diet itself is another layer of complexity—sun bears eat something like 200 different food items, from insects to small vertebrates to fruit to the cambium layer of bark. That’s an enormous amount of ecological information to transmit.
Why Teaching Your Cub to Smell Ripe Durian from Half a Kilometer Away Actually Matters for Survival
Wait—maybe the most fascinating part is how much of this teaching revolves around olfactory information. Sun bears have an exceptionally acute sense of smell, and mothers seem to actively train cubs to recognize specific scent signatures associated with food availability. When a durian tree is about to drop fruit, there’s apparently a particular smell change that happens, and experienced bears can detect this from absurd distances. Cubs don’t inherently know this; they have to learn it through repeated exposure guided by their mothers. Field observations have documented mothers pausing mid-forage to essentially make their cubs smell things—pressing the cub’s nose toward bark crevices or rotting logs where beetles might be hiding.
The consequences of poor education are pretty dire in fragmented rainforest habitats. Cubs that don’t recieve adequate training from their mothers show lower survival rates after independence, probably because they simply don’t know where to find food during lean periods. Anyway, this has conservation implications, because sun bear populations are declining—habitat loss, poaching, the usual depressing list—and orphaned cubs raised in captivity miss out entirely on this knowledge transfer. You can’t really teach a bear cub how to be a bear if you’re a human researcher with a graduate degree and no claws.
Honestly, watching these interactions changed how I think about animal intelligence and cultural transmission. These aren’t just instinctive behaviors playing out—this is deliberate, time-intensive education happening in real time, with all the frustrations and small victories that implies. The mother bear I watched in Borneo eventually got her cub to successfully extract termites. The cub ate maybe six termites, looked incredibly pleased with itself, then immediately got distracted by a millipede and wandered off.
That felt about right.
