Grizzly Bear's Single Hair Reveals What it Eats in the Wild

What can you learn from a single hair? You can learn quite a bit with a new technique. Scientists have discovered a way to determine exactly what a grizzly bear has been eating over several months just by looking at a single hair.

Grizzly bears are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in the United States. With their powerful bodies and jaws, these animals are known for their ability to catch salmon and for their hibernation behavior.

The new technique is huge boon when it comes to conserving these animals. It may help determine how grizzly bears are recovering and if they have enough habitat to meet their food needs.

"You can see bears chasing down salmon, but other than saying 'bears eat salmon,' that really doesn't give you much information," said Charles Robbins, one of the researchers, in a news release. "So we'd like to know where the energy and protein is coming from to create either large bears or small bears or cubs and help them with their reproduction. We'd like something that integrates all that information over a 24-hour period, a week, a month, a year."

The new technique takes advantage of the fact that trace elements bind to the sulfur atoms in keratin, which is a major component in hair. The researchers use a laser to run down the length of a single hair. As the laser vaporizes one location, the gases are analyzed by a mass spectrometer.

The researchers actually found levels of mercury, copper and zinc, which allowed them to determine what the bears had been eating. More specifically, these elements tell scientists about salmon consumption.

The findings are published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

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