The plains bison, the titans of the Great Plains, narrowly escaped extinction at the hands of advancing European settler-colonialists, only being saved by a few conservationists who stewarded the species to the more stable position they sit at today. The wood bison (B. bison athabascae) has recovered since

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Once roaming from California to the Eastern seaboard with a population to the tune of 60 million, along with other megafauna like deer, bears, elk, cougars, and wolves, and if you go back far enough, Columbian mammoths, horses, mastodons, and saber-tooth tigers, bison were an integral part of the diet and culture of Plains tribes. Their unstatable value led to their near-destruction, as to cripple the Plains tribes, the U.S government led a genocidal campaign to wipe out the bison to starve the natives.

Today, the bison's numbers are climbing, and have re-established themselves and range as far west as Chihuahua, Mexico.

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Bison are rarely preyed upon due to their size. Still, weak or sick individuals are regularly culled by wolves (and likely were preyed upon by predators such as dire wolves, the American lion, Homotherium, Smilodon, and short-faced bears before their untimely extinctions): predation by wolves usually peaks in late winter, when other food sources have mostly dried up.

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Bison are grazers, primarily feeding on grass throughout its range.

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After the age of three male bison leave their herds to either live solitarily or form bachelor herds while females live together (although a few big males stay with them). A small group of females stays with each dominant male during the breeding season. The group is taken care of by the males until they allow the males to mate with them by chasing away other males and staying with his herd. Bison are also a species that show homosexual behaviors, with males doing so much more than females.