Grizzly Bears Essay

jordan

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grizzly bears prefered habitat is deserted rivers, wild mountains, and thick and dense forest. Grizzly bears are majestic symbols of the wild. Bears live in and use a variety of habitat types, playing important roles in each one. This makes them an “umbrella species,” meaning that when we protect them and their habitat we also protect many species. Grizzly bears can also help ecosystems by distributing seeds and nutrients through their scat, and occasionally regulating ungulate populations.

they are at the top of the food chain of the grassland plants and animals. Grizzly bears are powerful, top-of-the-food-chain predators, yet much of their diet consists of nuts, berries, fruit, leaves, and roots. Bears also

eat other animals, from rodents to moose. Grizzlies are typically brown, though their fur can appear to be white-tipped, or grizzled, lending them their traditional name. Despite their impressive size, grizzlies are quite fast and have been clocked at 30 miles (48 kilometers) an hour. They can be dangerous to humans, particularly if surprised or if humans come between a mother and her cubs.

grizzly bears are omnivore. Grizzly bears are omnivores, and their diet can vary widely. They may eat seeds, berries, roots, grasses, fungi, deer, elk, fish, dead animals and insects. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) have concave faces, a distinctive hump on their shoulders, and long claws about two to four inches long. Both the hump and the claws are traits associated with a grizzly bear’s exceptional digging ability. Grizzlies are often dark brown, but can vary from very light cream to black. The long guard hairs on their backs and shoulders frequently have white tips and give the bears a "grizzled" appearance, hence the name "grizzly." The correct scientific name for the species is “brown bear,” but only coastal bears in Alaska and Canada are referred to as such, while inland bears and those found in the lower 48 states are called grizzly bears.

they dig and move the land to eat food such as shellfish and gofers A grizzly bear is adapted to its environment with its sharp claws, itsbuild and its ability to hibernate. The grizzly uses its claws to as a striking force and to hunt for supper, which is made up of both plants and burrowing animals.

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The definition of the relationship and exactly who is what in this relationship:
Salmon are born in rivers and spend their early life there. As they grow they swim out to sea and live their adult lives in the ocean. When they have reached full-size and are sexually mature they return to rivers to spawn. Most salmon will return to the river they were born in and make their way upstream to the place they were born. The trip is generally hazardous, as they have to work their way up rapids. Over 95 percent of salmon will die after they have spawned, the website Environmental Graffiti reports.
Grizzly bears tend to live solitary lives and normally hibernate from late fall to early spring through the harsh Alaskan winter. They have a varied diet, living on grasses, berries, insects and roots as well as small mammals and carrion. To survive through hibernation they must put on a thick layer of fat or they will not pull through. Fishing for salmon in late summer is the best way for them to get the food they can store as fat.
The bears generally catch salmon from rocks where the fish have to jump to reach the next level of the stream. Cubs develop their fishing technique by watching their mother, and some bears are better fishers than others. Bears must eat about 25 fish a day to put on enough fat to survive the winter hibernation. When fish are plentiful they might just eat the head and brains and the roe, or fish eggs. When fish are scarce they will try to steal each other's catch.
The grizzly bear is the predator and the salmon is the prey.

some facts about this relationship:
The relationship between salmon and grizzly bear is such that if there is a negative impact to salmon or the grizzly’s habitat, the numbers begin to significantly drop.

In recent years, chum salmon returns have seriously decreased in the Great Bear Rainforest. In the fall of 2009, local people reported that a majority of bears did not return to fall fishing grounds. There is major concern that grizzly bears starved in their dens over the previous winter due to lack of salmon in the feeding season before that.

The characteristics of the grizzly bear as a top predator also make it highly vulnerable to threats. Although it is an omnivore, because it relies heavily on salmon to make it through the winter, it is vulnerable to anything that impacts on salmon runs. It needs wide-ranging habitat and is slow to reproduce. As such, grizzly bears are considered not just a key species but also an ‘umbrella species’ because the protection of their habitats will result in an ‘umbrella of protection’ for a wide range of other species. The protected areas that have been set aside in the Great Bear Rainforest are not enough to sustain healthy populations of grizzly bear so it requires additional habitat set aside from logging. Trophy hunting of grizzly bears also continues to place their population at

risk.

On a cold, overcast day last fall, Jesse Logan and Wally Macfarlane hiked up Packsaddle Peak near Emigrant, Mont., not far from Yellowstone National Park. They had to climb high into the forest, at least 8,500 feet above sea level, to find the trees: tall, majestic whitebark pines, which grow slowly and can live more than a thousand years. A light snow started falling halfway up the mountain, the flakes getting heavier and wetter as they climbed. "You gotta want it to get up in here," said Macfarlane, 46, a researcher from the Department of Watershed Resources at Utah State University.
The last time Macfarlane and Logan, 69, a former entomologist with the US Forest Service, hiked this peak, in 2009, they found the trees' normally bright green needles turning shades of yellow and red. Now, just four years later, all the needles had fallen to the ground, and there were few signs of life in the forest. Even covered in fresh snow, which can lend anything a beautiful luster, the dead trees gave the landscape a bleak, post-apocalyptic aspect.
All across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 28,000-square-mile area covering parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, a devastating beetle infestation has been killing whitebark pines. The consequences may stretch far beyond the fate of a single species of tree, however. The whitebark pine has been called the linchpin of the high-altitude ecosystem. The trees produce cones that contain pine seeds that feed red squirrels, a bird known as the Clark's nutcracker and, most significantly, grizzly bears–a symbol of the American West and the current focus of a high-profile conservation battle.
In December, a panel of experts from across federal government recommended taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to issue its final ruling on the status of the bears in the coming weeks. Successfully bringing the bears back from the brink of extinction would be a huge victory for the agency and for the Endangered Species Act, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in late December.
Yet some environmentalists and scientists like Logan and Macfarlane believe the grizzly bears are still in peril, because the whitebark is in peril. They argue that the government has failed to acknowledge the true role that climate change is playing in the pine beetle infestation. High up in the alpine wilderness, they say, a crisis is unfolding–the denial of which is a stark example of the government's refusal to take the effects of climate change seriously.
"You have a bureaucracy that changes slowly, and you have an ecology that is being compressed in time in a way that we've never experienced as humans on this earth," said Logan. "There are a lot of people within the agencies that are well aware and concerned. But there are also those whose response is denial that there's a real critical issue here."
He and Macfarlane began working together in 2004 after meeting at a conference of US and Canadian researchers studying bark beetles. It was at that conference, Macfarlane says, that they first realized they were dealing with "the largest insect outbreak in recorded history." A local news story referred to them as the "whitebark warriors," a moniker that has stuck.
"Once you get into whitebark, it gets under your skin," Logan explained. "It was just the ecology and the drama, and everything that's associated with it in Yellowstone. I just couldn't walk away from it."
Because they grow at high elevations, whitebark pine trees historically did not have to deal with infestations of mountain pine beetles. Cold snaps, with temperatures sometimes plunging 30 to 40 degrees below zero, had been enough to keep beetle populations in check.
Not anymore. Global temperatures are an average of 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the 20th century norm, and the situation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is even more alarming, with temperatures 1.4 degrees higher than last century's average. As temperatures have risen, the beetles have moved farther north and to higher elevations. Recent studies have also found that the warmer temperatures appear to be speeding up the beetles' reproductive cycle, meaning there are many more of them than there used to be. The whitebark pine trees, despite being able to stand up to the harsh alpine conditions, are nearly defenseless against the invaders.
"Whitebark is one hell of a survivor," Logan said, "but it's not a competitor."
Logan began looking at the impact rising temperatures might have on whitebark pines back in the late 1990s, when he was still with the Forest Service. "Before any of this started, we were saying this could happen unbelievably fast," he said. "But I was thinking this is something maybe my grandchildren will see, maybe my children. I'm not going to see it."
In 2003, however, his prediction started coming true. Throughout the region, whitebark forests began showing signs of infestation: first patches of trees with yellowing needles, then spots of red, dying trees. Within a few years, some whitebark forests were a sea of red. By 2009, according to Logan and Macfarlane, 95 percent of the whitebark forests in the Yellowstone region showed signs of infestation.
A deep cold snap that year beat back the beetle population, however, at least temporarily. According to the federal government's scientists, the beetle problem peaked then and has been on the decline ever since. But Logan and Macfarlane say the feds aren't seeing what they're seeing.
Over the summer and early fall of 2013, they partnered with the environmental groups Union of Concerned Scientists and Clean Air Cool Planet to send several young researchers deep into the whitebark forests to document the trees' status. Some of the areas they surveyed were a three-day hike off forest roads. They didn't find the shocking sea of red like they had during the outbreak of the previous decade, but they did find many trees facing new beetle attacks. Fifty-two percent of the plots included trees that beetles had killed, nearly half of those from infestations within the last 30 months.
"What they were able to document is, rather than this major outbreak that was easy to document, there's been this insidious, chronic mortality, that, if you add it up over time, is no less threatening to the whitebark," said Logan. "But it's not as obvious because you don't have the sea of red forest." This, said Logan, is evidence of a long, slow, climate-fueled mortality for the whitebark.