Face recognition isn't just for humans -- it's learning to identify bears and cows, too

San Francisco (CNN Business)It's hard for the average person to tell Dani, Lenore, and Bella apart: They all sport fashionably fuzzy brown coats and enjoy a lot of the same activities, like playing in icy-cold water and, occasionally, ripping apart a freshly caught fish. Melanie Clapham is not the average person. As a bear biologist, she has spent over a decade studying these grizzly bears, who live in Knight Inlet in British Columbia, Canada, and developed a sense for who is who by paying attention to little things that make them different. "I use individual characteristics -- say, one bear has a nick in its ear or a scar on the nose," she said. But Clapham knows most people don't have her eye for detail, and the bears' appearances change dramatically over the course of a year -- such as when they get winter coats and fatten up before denning -- which makes it even harder to distinguish between, say, Toffee and Blonde Teddy.