Grizzly Bear

Fascinating facts about the Grizzly Bear

• Coastal Alaskan grizzlies dwarf their inland cousins. Males on the peninsula tip the scales at 389 kg (858 lb) and females at 207 kg (456 lb), while interior Canadian males average just 139 kg (306 lb) and females 95 kg (209 lb). This size gap mirrors food richness, salmon-laden streams let coastal bears pack on muscle, revealing how diet directly sculpts bear morphology across the continent.
• Before hibernation, a grizzly can bulk up by about 180 kg (400 lb) during a brief hyperphagia binge. This rapid fat gain fuels the five-to-seven-month winter fast, during which the bear neither eats, defecates nor urinates. The stored energy not only keeps the mother alive but also powers milk production for newborn cubs, highlighting the bear's extreme seasonal metabolic flexibility.
• North America still hosts roughly 60,000 wild grizzlies, with half of them, 30,000, roaming Alaska. British Columbia alone held about 16,000 in 2008, a figure refined to 15,075 by the 2012 DNA-based count. These numbers, derived from hair-snagging and mark-recapture models.
• Grizzlies carry a massive genetic blueprint: the 2018 genome sequence measured 2,328.64 Mb and holds 30,387 genes.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Grizzly Bear

The grizzly bear is the living embodiment of wild North America: massive, powerful, and deeply woven into the ecosystems it moves through. Each autumn, grizzlies become eating machines, consuming up to 20,000 calories a day before retreating to dens where they will give birth while still sleeping. Their presence in a river system signals abundance, their salmon-dragging enriching forests with nutrients from the sea.

Grizzly Bear photographed on Feravox

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