Written in a Bear's Hair: teacher key

Grizzly Bears, grade 11 edition, written for 11th grade. Hair and blood show what a bear ate. Then follow the grizzly's food, its winter cues and its numbers across the lower 48 states.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. How much of a bear's diet does its hair show?
   • About a year (answer)
   • About a day
   • About ten days
2. How much diet does blood serum show?
   • About a year
   • Only the previous 10 to 14 days (answer)
   • About a decade
3. What happened in poor whitebark pine seed years?
   • Grizzlies stopped eating
   • Grizzlies lost much body condition
   • Grizzlies seemed to eat more animal matter (answer)
4. Hair and blood serum cover different spans of time. What does this let scientists do?
   • Tell diet over different spans of time (answer)
   • Count bears from the air
   • Find dens in the snow
5. What did the three-winter study conclude about hibernation?
   • The bear's body started it, and snow ended it
   • Cues from the environment mainly started it, and cues from the bear's body ended it (answer)
   • Food alone started and ended it
6. What does subspecies mean?
   • A kind of food
   • A winter den
   • A kind within a species (answer)

Words

• isotope: kind of atom
• serum: blood fluid
• subspecies: kind within species
• hyperphagia: fall overeating
• middens: stored caches