How are bears so huge? If I ate nothing but berries and salmon I’d probably be really slender.
Im concerned with folks nutritional competency. Salmon has a lot of fat
That’s not how fat works at all. Adipose tissue is formed to store energy (calories) and it does not matter what the source of that energy is. It can be saturated fat, unsaturated fat, various forms of carbs… when eating more calories than used the excess is saved for later in adipose tissue.
I challenge you to a fun experiment. Go eat 5 gallons of ice cream. chart the calories and chart its metabolic effect on you and how much weight it makes you gain. Take before/after body measurements. Chart how long it takes you to burn that weight & inches off to get back to your baseline.
after you’re back to your baseline, eat the equal amount of calories in salmon. chart the same data as first experiment. come back and give us the results.
My hypothesis (from repeated personal experience) Is that ice cream has a much worse effect on the metabolism and body measurements. Salmon is much gentler and makes you feel healthier and look and feel better.
Bears tend to eat larger portions.
Depends on how much you ate, but similar to us, bears can be omnivores (though they tend to eat more meat type stuff): They’ll eat whatever they can, which can definitely include a lot of berries and fish, but they also eat nuts, roots, insects, honey, carrion, etc.
You might be underestimating how nutrient-rich a steady diet of salmon can be.
According to a ranger in Denali I spoke to: It depends on where the bears live in relation to the food. Coastal grizzlies are much larger because they have plentiful fat and protein sources like salmon. Inland grizzlies that live near glacial streams don’t have that food source and subsist on larger quantities of berries and the like and are noticeably smaller than their coastal counterparts.
So the food sources directly impact the sizes of the animals within the same species. The grizzly I saw in Denali appeared no larger than well-fed black bears I have encountered in the Sierra Nevada range. I say appeared, because it very well may have been larger. But it certainly didn’t look like the ones near the coast.
Kind of an answer, but I’m not a bear biologist.
I’ve heard that bears feeding on salmon will eat only the high-value parts of the salmon and abandon the rest to scavengers, so I can believe it. More efficient when there’s a lot.
