The one thing about BFs that baffle me is their sheer size and mass and being a mammal as well means that it would require massive amounts of calories to sustain itself, so how much calories based on their estimated height and weight do you think a BF would need to sustain itself?

That is something no one could say.
We have no clue how many hours a day it would sleep the more it sleeps the less it would need.
We have no way of knowing where it gets them calories different things have different amounts. If say it eats mainly meat it is going to need much less then if it eats only greens. Then add in things like fruit and nuts and such and just no way to tell how hard it would be to find food for it.

Umm.. Is only a rough estimation based on their reported height and weight let's add to that the possibility that they are omnivorous as they'd probably need to be to survive with such a size in the roughed Pacific Northwest.

How much does the average Adult Grizzly weigh & how many Calories do they need ???

I do not know the exact number but I do they need to literally gorge themselves before winter when they hibernate and by gorging I mean that they have to gain at least 80 pounds or more to last thru the winter. And BF according to reports are considerably larger than bears if you can imagine...

7500 calories per day.

Damn that's a lot! But if Bears can do it a creature as resourceful as BF sure can too!

I guess that's one advantage of being omnivorous. From the dates of sighting, even in the far NW and Northern US, I do not believe a NA Ape hybernates in any way.

There may be some similiar strategy to put on as much weight as possible in the fall though, both to store up on calories and to add body fat for insulation.

The diet may change depending on the terrain, treeline, mammal density etc. If you can haul a 100lb piece of meat way up in a tree you could store up and not have to defend your kill against as many predators.



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Somehow that made me laugh. Don't get me wrong, It makes sense if the big guy wanted to take off for awhile but somehow that just sounds funny.

LOL yeah, I know it does.

But what are your options? Bury it? Carry it around with you and eat on the run? Even a cave would have to be defensible.

If you throw it up in a big tree, maybe some big cats can get to it. But you just bend some branches over like golden arches, and come back later for more happy meal.

I remember seeing some pics once of what a woman claims was a BF kill out in the boonies somewhere. This deer? was pulverized in to the ground.

I'd just like to point out that in general the bigger the type of animal, the smaller and more plentiful its food. For example, look at big whales, the biggest ones eat plankton, which are literally everywhere. Even big bears eat a whole lot of grass, grubs and bugs, fish, and so forth, and really not that much killed deer. The bigger and fatter the bear, the less inclined it is to chase after and kill deer when it has all the food it needs right there in the forest, available for the eating. Probably most of the deer it eats are going to be the newborns and fauns that are much easier to acquire, and are an available food source before the berry season starts.

I'm not a bear - but the the bigger and fatter I get - the less I'm inclined to chase after deer, too.

Vilnoori makes some excellent points and I'm inclined to agree.
However, winter season in the northern ranges require migration or hibernation IMHO.

I agree with both of you 100%. I'm not suggesting that BF is a raging savage carnivore. I'm suggesting that as an 800lb mammal that has to stay warm, they would be opportunistic.



Those were my sentiments exactly in another thread.

I would say more so than a man, judging its size and weight. More or less it would have to eat a balanced diet to sustain life in the wild.

A balanced diet for a BF may not be what it is for a human. There are quite significant dietary differences, say, between a gorilla, and a human. Gorillas are able to subsist mainly on leaves and bugs, and their digestive tract has friendly bacteria that assist them with digesting the leaves. Lots of monkeys out there have very amazing adaptations for eating leaves that we don't. One sighting is of a female sasquatch chowing down on willow leaves. I assure you that willow leaves are not a part of a human's balanced diet, and if that sighting is true, then it indicates that they have significant adaptations to consuming herbivorous matter that we can only speculate about.

Someone also mentioned the possibility that they are preying on skunks (among other things no doubt), that's why they smell skunky in some areas, but not all. I think you'll find most people wouldn't entertain the notion of dining on skunk!!! No, I think they are very different from us when it comes to digestion. Still opportunistic, but much much tougher and able to eat a lot of what we couldn't.

But then our particular culture is so finicky. I was reading about what the Inuit used to eat in the old days. They'd eat the bone marrow and organs as the richest source of fat, and dry the muscle mass for pemmican/winter food, pulverized with berries. They still consider the raw eyeballs the best part, and eat most of their fresh meat raw. Tough, tough folks.

Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern

If he can eat those things, I'm sure our big friend can choke down some serious tuff and gross snacks.

Vilnoori's comment about the dietary customs of Inuit reminded me of an account Peter Freuchen's "Book of the Eskimo" in which he describes a traditional food being the carcass of a seal, caught in the early part of the year at a local bird rookery, which would, after beeing emptied of internal organs (presumably eaten) be stuffed full of the abundant local seabird eggs and some local herbs , sewn up, placed under a cairn of rocks to prevent bears and foxes from getting it, where it would cure by fermentation due to wild yeasts in the area, and under the continuous sun and relatively chilly temperatures until the fall when the group would return to reclaim their delicacy. The eggs were reported to be a semi-solid frozen delight eaten by squeezing the shell between the fingers, popping the the lightly carbonated slushy orb into their eager mouths, rich with the products of fermentation (vitamin B.)...presumably an acquired taste, but no more repulsive in concept than some of our own delicacies like blue cheese or feta.Modern traditionalists in Alaska are very fond of "stink fin" or "stink heads" which are fermented while burried in the ground...and of course the icelandic people cherish a dish made of shark in similar manner. Mmmmm...ammonia.

Ugh.
Those Scots have had their damn "Haggus" tradition spread out all over the world, it seems.

BLECCH.

Just eat the darn eggs when they're fresh, for Cripes sake.

LOL! or Sourkraut, pickled mushrooms, smoked fish roe (caviar), 4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie, or any number of other things I could think of! When I was a kid in Africa my mom had some local pastors to dinner one day. She gave them spaghetti and tomato sauce. They ran out retching into the street, thinking she was serving worms and blood sauce. lol The Africans also thought eating an egg was a great waste! A whole potential chicken! I loved to enjoy fried termites on toast (or just raw), crickets and grasshoppers fried or toasted on a stick over a fire. And many other things that make my kids go "eeewww! Mom!" But, I guess I'm getting off topic...

That's really funny...and before we go back on topic, you've heard, I presume, the story of the former villagers who were new arrivals in the US, who couldn't speak english but were quick to do shopping for themselves which they found they could readily do because were used to identifying what they were buying at the grocery store by looking at the image that was on the package...all was well until they encountered the Gerbers Baby Food. Exit screaming.

On topic, again...it might be interesting to think outside of the box when it comes to imagining what a large creature might find worth exploiting in an environment. Brought to mind is the story of the bears and others feasting on aeolean plankton in the form of moths, or certain grazing animals eating nestlings and other small critters. Ewel Gibbons could have learned a few tricks from BF.

LMAO

I almost fell of the chair when I read that!

5-10,000 depending on energy needs.

If they exist, they eat meat. I am convinced of that. And probably many other things....

Look at the size of moose and elk....they survive just fine on veggies alone.

Actually their stomachs are designed to deal with the roughest shrubbery they can consume. Primates as far as we know do not have that kind of stomachs.

Moose and elk have a highly specialized digestive system that allows for the efficient digestion of poor quality browse such as leaves, twigs and bark.
I do not know of any primates that have a four part stomach.
Therefore, I think that any comparisons to ruminants is a bit of a stretch.

edited to add...PunkMaister beat me to it.

Most of the reports of individuals coming across a sasquatch comsuming something - it seems the creature was 'grubbing and twigging'. Although there are reports of human deer kills and natural kills being snagged. They also seem to be fairly adept at taking small livestock from farms, rabbit hutches and the like. I wouldn't doubt that with the reports of large to huge size rocks being thrown that they might be very good at knocking the beans out of some game and of course eating them raw thereafter. One report stated that the hunters dropped a deer, it ran some distance and by the time the hunters got to the final 'drop' site - the deer had clearly been retrieved by something that could heft it in a single carry. Then when tracked - a deer leg was torn off and dropped along the trail and another half mile down the trail another leg was ripped off and left on the trail. Lightening the load or stopping a trailing bear - I don't know.

I kind of wonder what they do when foliage and game kind of lay low seasonally - like in the winter. The sasquatch HAVE to eat both vegetable and animal to fill their caloric needs. But imagine in winter when things shrivel up and blow away. That would necessitate the sasquatch to being migratory, not too many hundreds of miles but say pick a range from Southwestern Canada to Southern California. They're always hanging by mountians with a steady water supply, creeks every few miles. They probably have a hunting range of 10 miles per day.

I think you have to switch your thinking from modern day human and get back to nature, no offense ment but many tend to think human in talking about BF and he is more animal than human in my opinion.
As an animal and a top preditor you have 3 things to worry about, food, water, and procreating...This is a 24 hour a day job, not to say he does not sleep, but to say he is active at all times of the day. He is omnivorious and has been speculated they can eat most anythig in forest from lite shoots to ferns to wetland follage to high mountian evergreens....Now mix that with his hunting prowness and the abundance of game year round and advantage in the winter months of land game and spring fishing makes for a good cocopheny of food source.
Now to take it one step futher and take the largest land mammal, the elephant, how much does it take to keep one going, let alone a whole herd of them....Yet they live in some of the most airid parts of the country....point counter point

PS a BF can cover 10 miles in a hour easy if they really wanted to....

Gotcha = Thanks to you both for the info on moose and elk.

Soooo, what your saying is that bigfoot is a cross between an ape, a man, and an ungulate??? Hahahaha!

Just because he's horny - doesn't make him an ungulate.

It has been noted that in all primates to include man that forrige off the land , be it fern or fawna, we all use a type of clay or chalk to help with digestion....for instance humans who have upset stomaches from acidic foods we eat are no more removed than BF eating acidic veggitation such as nettles, though highly acidic there have been reports of evidance in that they go to clay areas and eat clay. we as human ingest chalk/clay when we eat antacids such as tums and the like.

So even though elk and moose eat the barks and folliage so does the bF and with all these creatures, like drawn to salt licks, they are also drawn to clay deposits to help in digestion, thus the conclusion that BF may not be a ungulate, but that these food are available to it....

thus the tie between the ungutlate creatures and BF could possibly be both salt and clay...

So GOGrizzly you may very well be an ass for calling out this observation and not knowing what the hell you are talking about, as usual

What does indigestion have to do with this topic? If I may ask and as you can see now you got just about everyone baffled...

Welcome to the forum Alaska Girl!

There are plants that the creature feeds on that is very acidic yet is healthy, they are called nettles in this part, they are among alot of plant types that to a creature can cause indegestion but are highly good in nutrients...They use clay to sooth there stomachs...like elk and deer....So foods you would not or could not ingest, they can....thus survival in the wild....

Point in fact is find a good clay deposit and you will find creatures lured to it like a salt lick...

BTW nettles boiled make a very good tea....

Elk and Deer are rumiants and again as such have a 3 stomach system, for a BF to consume the same thing as a Rumiant you have to prove that they have such a 3 stomach system which simply does not happen in primates unless you want to claim that BF is some sort of bipedal rumiant and not an ape of any kind, is this where you are going with all this?

Simply... They would need more calories in than calories burned.
It would depend on what they did during a given day.
Notice how in storms or real cold weather some animals just stay put.
It seems better sometimes to sit tight and burn few calories than to burn
a lot in search of food when conditions aren't good for finding food.
I think it would vary from day/day.
Many large animals move slowly and munch food continuously all day to
feed the furnace.

You are missing the point, it is not about how many stomachs a creature has, its about food in the wild and how they can utilize them to their benefit and how...It would be rediculas to say a BF is a rumiant, but they can forage off the same follage as one, with clay helping in the digestion as with rumiants.

This will not prove anything to the ney sayers, but do a google search "Bigfoot Clay" and see how many hits you get. Keep in mind clay deposits are not that commen.

Which is precisely why is very unlikely that they sustain themselves that way it makes more sense for them to be omnivores hat to try to find hard to find clay to try to diggest virtually indigestible and low nutrient value foods...

I consider rare, corn fed, black angus beef a delicacy. The surface is "browned" for appearance, but it's basically raw. My mouth is watering just typing about it...

I also highly enjoy tuna and shrimp sashimi. (i.e. raw).

It's not tough, it's tender... once you get a taste of raw, you crave it.

In our house when we eat steaks we eat them rare! Well seasoned though we Puertorricans like our food spicy!

I agree with Vilnoori when it comes to food sources. I think people would be amazed and the amount of nutrients, especially protein, in a handful of grubs not to mention all of the abundant food sources available in the West, especially NW. We have grubs, bugs, berries, small mammals, fungi, grasses, roots, tubers, fish, shellfish, eggs, seeds, nuts... the list is extensive.

http://www.food-insects.com/Insects%20as%20Human%20Food.htm has good info on bugs as a food source. Some resources on Ethnobotony are also good reference. Finding out what NA's sustained themselves upon will give you a good idea of the variety of food sources available to a sasquatch.

This is a really interesting thread, from my reading it seems universally established that they are omnivores of some type, the argument comes from where on the spectrum between carnivore and vegitarian they fall, personally from everything i have read it seemed that they were quite evenly omnivorous, but now thinking about this bacteria theory, i am more inclined to think that they are more carnivorous, the one i saw had an enormous barrel chest but did not have the pot belly of a gorilla or orangutan, it was more in line with the ribs like a human or chimpanzee. I think it would be hard to know how many calories they would require, but going along with the calories for bears, i would assume something like 15000+ per day for the one i saw.

3876 calories - 155lb black bear
10592 calories - 700 lb grizzly
6591 calories - 375lb grizzly
4611 calories - 115 lb grizzly