Certificate - Etheses - Saurashtra University

Marchinton, 1980; Smith, 1986; Hellgren and Vaughan, 1989; Oli et al., 1997; Dobey
et al., 2002 and Hersey et al., 2005).
2.6 Feeding ecology
Most bears were opportunistic omnivores, their diets comprised of fruits, other
vegetative materials, and in lesser amounts, mammals, fishes and insects.
Evolutionary, brown bears have developed several adaptations for herbivory,
including expansion of molar chewing surfaces and longer claws for digging.
Nevertheless, they have maintained an unspecialized digestive system capable of
digesting protein with efficiency equal to that of obligate carnivores (Bunnell and
Hamilton, 1983). Most commonly, brown bear feeding habits have been quantified by
analysis of scat contents. However, because of the differential digestibility of foods,
contents of fecal residue were rarely equivalent to amounts of foods ingested by bears.
The resulting underestimation of highly digestible foods was found most pronounced
for meat and fish diets (Hewitt and Robbins, 1996).
The major food items of brown bear were grouped into variety of ways based on
taxonomic group and method of acquisition (LeFranc et al., 1987). They included (1)
vegetative matter readily available for grazing such as graminoids, horsetails and
forbs; (2) roots, corns and bulbs acquired by digging; (3) fruits produced from shrubs;
(4) insects harvested from nests or aggregation sites, including ants (Formicidae),
wasps (Vespidae) and moths and beetles; (5) mammals and birds, acquired through
predation or scavenging, including ungulates and rodents and (6) fish acquired
through predation or scavenging, including salmon and trout.
21