Certificate - Etheses - Saurashtra University

fruits and mammals. Their study also suggested that brown bears of the Plitvice Lakes
National Park were largely herbivorous and exhibited distinct seasonal cycles in food
consumption and mature beech forests were a major food source for bears in the
spring. The food habits of grizzly bears were found to vary with season in the Mission
Mountains, Montana (Servheen, 1983). Perennial graminoids and forbs, such as
Taraxacum spp. and Trifolium spp. comprised the bulk of spring foods. Mammal
carrion and birds were also important as spring foods. Grizzly bears obtained spring
insects by excavating rotting wood from tree stumps and logs. Forbs with starchy and
tuberous roots such as Erythronium grandiflorum, Lomatium spp., and Hedysarum
spp. were excavated by bears during June and July. Domestic tree fruits (apples,
plums and pears) were the major autumn food resource used on the west slope of the
Mission. In Trentino, Italy, agricultural lands and orchards provided an important
autumn food source for brown bears (Osti, 1975). Feeding habits of Asiatic black
bears have been investigated in Japan by analyzing the isotopic changes along the
entire length of hair samples (Mizukami et al., 2005). Diets were estimated from fecal
residues and stable isotope analyses of hair (Fortin et al., 2007). Their study reveals
that both sexes of brown bears visited salmon streams and consumed significant
amounts of salmon, but only male American blacks visited streams and then
consumed minimal amount of salmon. Thus, brown bears were largely carnivorous
and black bear were largely herbivorous and frugivorous. Like brown bears, sloth bear
(Melursus ursinus) has been the only species of ursidae adapted to feed on insects,
especially termites and ants. Dietary composition of sloth bear was studied based on
frequency occurrence and percent weight of different food items in scats (Gokula et
al., 1995; Baskaran et al., 1997 and Desai et al., 1997) as well as through direct
observation of feeding behavoiur (Joshi et al., 1997). In Central India, Ficus species
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