Grizzly Bear Diets

For a long time researchers have been trying to retrieve data on Grizzly bear diets. It is clear that all Grizzly bears have different habitats, food sources, and outside pressures such as human development. Although this is true Grizzly bears have been seen to commonly have the same diets over the course of seasonal shifts. For example, Grizzly bear diet and use of seasonally abundant, nutrient-rich food sources has been well documented throughout their range in North America. A wide diversity of foods is consumed, reflecting the species' omnivorous and generalist nature. Food-habit relations are therefore often locally variable, making extrapolations from other populations difficult. Even within a population, annual and seasonal variations in food productivity can alter
Even without annual and seasonal variation, discrimination of foods can occur between sexes. Larger males rely more on animal protein to sustain their large body mass, whereas females can persist on vegetative diets alone. ( Munro, R. H., Nielsen, S. E., Price, M. H., Stenhouse, G. B., & Boyce, M. S. 2006). In this study, we will take a sample of Grizzly bears and test to see if the food they choose depends on the sex of the bear or if the time of year effects the food preferred. Since the diet of the Grizzly bear is ever-changing the food sources available also encounter growths and declines as well. Once the majority of the Grizzlies diet was Cuttthroat Salmon, however since the predation on the salmon was so high for a great length of time in the Grizzlies' diet and forced the Salmon numbers to decline dramatically the Grizzly diet has switched. New evidence suggests that the decline of native cutthroat trout has caused omnivorous grizzly bears to kill more elk calves in some areas. (Middleton, A. D., Morrison, T. A., Fortin, J. K., Robbins, C. T., Proffitt, K. M., White, P. J.,