November 30, 1998 Missoulian article: Grizzly bear findings. Salmon was the main course, historically Elk, deer and moose are hit and miss. With salmon, bears can go to a stream and eat all day.- Grant Hildebrand, WSU researcher
The finding by Washington State University scientists raises questions about how the bears would survive if they are reintroduced into Washington and Idaho, since many salmon runs have been depleted. The study also found that salmon-eating grizzlies had a big role in providing the giant trees that lured the timber industry to the region.
"We are working with the latest high-tech science... to document what was probably a Native American parable - that bears and salmon are essential links between oceans and forests," said Charlie Robbins, who heads the WSU research team.
The West used to be home to 50,000 grizzly bears, who feasted on buffalo and salmon. Fewer than 1,000 remain today in the lower 48 states. Most are in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, with a few in Idaho and Washington.
Robbins and his team have studied long-dead bears to learn what sustained them. They found a dozen grizzlies taken from Washington, Oregon and Idaho between the 1850s and the 1930s, stuffed and stored from New York to Idaho.
Researcher Sean Farley chipped a bit of bone from the inside of the skulls, and snipped 10 hairs from each hide.
Bear researchers used to study feces to learn about the animals' diet. But researchers overestimated the importance of vegetation, because it passed through the bears. They underestimated the importance of food like salmon, which was absorbed.
Robbins, a wildlife nutritionist, and his team used a method called destructive isotope testing. Bones contain a lifetime record of what a creature eats, by accumulating chemicals found in specific foods.
Hair also contains a record, though of only the last season of a life. By burning bits of skull and hair and analyzing the gases, researchers can tell how much nutrition grizzlies got from salmon, from other animals, from fruit, from leaves and other vegetation. Traces of Columbia River Basin salmon turned up in every museum bear, even those that had lived in the southeastern Oregon desert.
A bear from the Lemhi Mountains of Idaho got 90 percent of its sustenance from salmon. Plenty of food is essential to the survival of the grizzlies, which hibernate for up to six months, and give birth while in the den. A mother that is too thin will abort her embryos.
"Elk, deer and moose are hit and miss," said WSU researcher Grant Hildebrand. "With salmon, bears can go to a stream and eat all day."
But the construction of huge Columbia and Snake river dams, fishing nets and habitat destruction nearly wiped out the 16 million salmon that spawned in the river system each year. These days, only a few thousand chinook make it back to Idaho from the ocean to spawn. The North Cascade Range in Washington and Idaho's Selway- Bitterroot/Frank Church Wilderness are the two places the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would like to reintroduce bears. The 5,800-square-mile Selway-Frank Church complex is the first candidate.
Hunters, trappers and sheep herders killed as many as 40 grizzlies a year in the Selway Bitterroot until the 1930s. Scientists believe a 1920s- era dam at Lewiston cut salmon off from that wilderness area and was gunpowder's major accomplice in eliminating grizzlies.
CAG Comment
The above statement may be torturing the truth in light of the Lewis & Clark Journals coupled with interviews of folks who lived in the Selway Bitterroot Ecosystem [SBE] from about the 1840's up throuh the 1940's, which included at least one government trapper, folks who never mentioned grizzly bear encounters, or for that matter, that they ever saw a grizzly bear in the SBE.
These observations seem to be made by overzealous adovcates for the introduction of grizzly bears into the SBE.
End CAG Comment
"With hardly any salmon in the Selway-Bitterroot, it's a major problem," says Scott Bosse, a conservation biologist with Idaho Rivers United. "And fire suppression may have drastically altered alternate food sources: pine nuts, grasses and bulbs."
Chris Servheen of Missoula, grizzly recovery expert for the Fish and Wildlife Service, insists there is ample food" for the 280 bears his agency wants living in the Selway- Bitterroot within the next 130 years.
Maybe we would be wisest not to listen to the IGBRC. They seem to be running on 'job security and the Y2Y fantasy.'
In the course of tracking grizzlies across the Kenai Peninsula, Hildebrand is showing that each salmon-eating bear produces 400 pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus a year - in a form much more easily used by trees than commercial fertilizer.
Salmon absorb the nutrients as they swim the ocean, and deliver them to the comparatively sterile rivers and streams of Alaska - as they once did in the Northwest.
Grizzlies eat the fish, absorb the fat, convert nitrogen into the most plant-friendly form, and relieve themselves of the nitrogen, phosphorous and possibly other important elements. That's also the way it happened in the Northwest.
"Salmon is accounting for 20 percent of the metabolism of the tree," Robbins says. "The gigantic, old-growth trees that grew along the river courses, that enriched the Northwest and the timber companies, were likely produced not only because they were old, but because of the millions of salmon that died in the streams and were eaten by wild animals that then fertilize the trees," he said.
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