Remote Cameras catch flirty and hunty polar bears

From TreeHugger.com
Polar Bear Spy Cam Eaten By ... a Polar Bear! Plus Mother & Cub Cuteness
by JAYMI HEIMBUCH

What happens when you place spy cams all over the arctic in order to track polar bears? Filmmaker John Downer wanted to track a mother and two cubs as they endure struggles of survival in the arctic, and to do so, he employed some clever camerawork. Though, when one bear discovered the cameras, it didn't work out so well for the equipment. However, most of the time, there was some amazing footage captured.

Filmmaker John Downer is behind the Polar Bears - Spy on the Ice movie premiering on Animal Planet at 10pm (EST) Thursday, 10 March 2011.. It looks like a whole lot of pure awesome.

Cool Hunting writes, "Downer employs three types of cameras to track the lives of two mother bears as they lead their clubs across Arctic Norway in search of seal hunting grounds for the den's survival. Not letting any of the frozen conditions get in the way of filming, the three cameras each offered a unique way of capturing the bears. The Snow-cam, disguised as a lump of snow, was equipped with four-wheel drive and tundra wheels to get across land and ice. The Blizzard-cam is rigged with propellers, allowing it to reach speeds of 37 mph, while the Iceberg cam was thoroughly waterproofed to maneuver between sheets of ice and under water to capture the polar bears swimming under the ice."

Check out what all four camera types look like. The only problem is when the cameras aren't so incognito. Last year, a male bear destroyed $200,000 worth of equipment. If you want to know how strong these animals are, make them mad by pointing a camera at them.

But for the cameras not discovered, they capture some great footage.

Introducing the Grolar Bear. Let's discuss implications.

The bear that David Kuptana shot on April 8 had white fur like a polar bear, but brown paws like a grizzly.
(pic from cbc.ca, submitted by Joseph Perry)

Let's discuss this - if the grolar bear persists and the polar bear goes extinct, could we maybe be happy about that? In the same way that people seem thrilled that neanderthals "live on" as part of some of us? Hybridization is a natural phenomenon and part of species evolution, I think its sad if the polar bear goes extinct but this maybe the silver lining as the ice melts....well of course, provided that people stop poaching them and selling their pelts to the highest bidder-MA

From Scientific American
Polar-grizzly bear hybrid found in Canada
By John Platt

An extremely rare "grolar bear"—a polar-grizzly bear hybrid—was shot and killed by an Inuit hunter in Canada's Northwest Territories last month.

Global warming has reportedly been driving grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) farther north in search of food, bringing them into polar bear (U. maritimus) territory. Polar bears, meanwhile, are finding themselves stranded on land instead of their usual sea ice, bringing them into contact with the grizzlies.

This is only the second time that a grolar bear has been encountered in the wild and confirmed, but even with its rarity, it is more distinctive than expected. DNA tests released by the N.W.T. Environment and Natural Resources Department reveal that this was actually a second-generation grolar bear—meaning one of its parents (its mother) was already a polar-grizzly hybrid. The father was a purebred grizzly, the tests found.

The hunter knew he had something unusual, which is why he asked to have it identified. The bear had the polar bear's white fur but a bigger head, brown paws and longer claws more typical of a grizzly bear.

The first grolar bear confirmed in the wild was killed by a hunter in 2006. A few others have been born in zoos.

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From cbc.ca
Bear shot in N.W.T. was grizzly-polar hybrid, could be first 2nd generation hybrid found in wild

Biologists in the Northwest Territories have confirmed that an unusual-looking bear shot earlier this month near Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., was a rare hybrid grizzly-polar bear.

The unusual-looking bear caught the attention of biologists after David Kuptana, an Inuvialuit hunter, shot and killed it on April 8 on the sea ice just west of the Arctic community, formerly known as Holman. The bear had thick white fur like a polar bear, but it also had a wide head, brown legs and brown paws like a grizzly. Kuptana said he shot the bear from a distance after it scavenged through five unoccupied cabins near Ulukhaktok, then tried running toward the community.

Wildlife DNA analysis shows the bear was a second-generation hybrid, officials with the N.W.T. Environment and Natural Resources Department said in a news release Friday. The bear was the result of a female grizzly-polar hybrid mating with a male grizzly bear, according to the department. "This confirms the existence of at least one female polar-grizzly hybrid near Banks Island," the release said. "This may be the first recorded second-generation polar-grizzly bear hybrid found in the wild."

Kuptana told CBC News he is currently selling the bear pelt to the highest bidder and has received calls from across Canada for the unique pelt. "Right now, we're already at $15,000, and we're going to see how far we can go," Kuptana said Friday. "If we can do better, we'll be happy."

The N.W.T.'s first confirmed "grolar bear" was shot by a U.S. hunter in Sachs Harbour, N.W.T., located on Banks Island, in April 2006. More DNA tests are planned to determine whether the bear shot this month was related to the one from 2006.

Hybrid bears will likely become more common in the North, as the direct consequence of climate change, predicts Brendan Kelly, a marine biologist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the absence of summer Arctic sea ice, polar bears are stranded on land and come into more contact with grizzly bears, he said. "We're taking this continent-sized barrier to animal movement, and in a few generations, it's going to disappear, at least in summer months," Kelly said. "That's going to give a lot of organisms — a lot of marine mammals in particular — who've been separated for at least 10,000 years the opportunity to interbreed again, and we're predicting we're going to see a lot more of that." Kelly said he has seen reports of harp seals and hooded seals interbreeding, as well as beluga whales and narwhal. Interbreeding helps species adapt to major shifts in their environments, he said.

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more info: Grolar Bear/Pizzly Bear/Prizzly Bear on Wikipedia

Thanks to Chrissie E for the link

Canadian polar bears turning to cannibalism in Hudson Bay

Image from Zareen's blog

From the WWF-Canada blog
by Peter J. Ewins, D.Phil.
Senior Officer, Species
Arctic Program

In the last few days the polar bears in western Hudson Bay, Canada, the best-studied subpopulation among the 19 across their Arctic range, have been giving us a dramatic and stunning new signal of population stress - at least 10 reported cases now of cannibalism.

In the last few days the polar bears in western Hudson Bay, Canada, the best-studied subpopulation among the 19 across their Arctic range, have been giving us a dramatic and stunning new signal of population stress - at least 10 reported cases now of cannibalism.

I was born in a coal-mining town in England, and was trained as a scientist, especially in marine animal ecology. The well-worn references to, and use of, the "canary in the coalmine" reflected very hard-learned lessons from past generations of miners in my birth-town. Better to read the signs in the canary in its cage 100 ft underground than to keel over yourself as carbon monoxide or other gases built up then poisoned you and your fellow miners.

In the last few days the polar bears in western Hudson Bay, Canada, the best-studied subpopulation among the 19 across their Arctic range, have been giving us a dramatic and stunning new signal of population stress - at least 10 reported cases now of cannibalism. Three decades of intensive polar bear studies here have hardly ever recorded such cannibalism. This is very new, and dramatic. The Nobel prize-winning IPCC team of 3000 world class scientists used this polar bear subpopulation and its responses to declining sea-ice coverage as an important signal in their assessments and modeling of the impacts and projections of/for rapid climate change. As an ecologist, I know that these are great studies over the past 30 years, and that the trends of key population parameters (cub survival, recruitment, adult survival, body condition, and eventually total population estimate) are familiar to any animal population experiencing major stress. It’s not specific to polar bears; most species when experiencing major habitat or population stresses respond in just these ways. That is the forces of nature at work. That's why the miners used the little canary in its cage.

It's December now, and to the amazement of local people and polar bears, and even cautious Arctic scientists, the sea ice has not yet returned to Hudson Bay! It’s late, very late, and so the polar bears who have spent the past five months or so along the coastline without significant fat-rich food , waiting for their sea-ice platform to return, are forced to wait even longer. It's likely that the hungriest, skinniest individuals are starving and desperate.... probably killing the weak and the young. That sea-ice used to be back in early November, then the bears all headed out quickly to catch ringed seals. Polar bears cannot survive on seaweed, berries or dried grass. They are top carnivores, evolved on a high fat diet. They have no option but to catch marine mammals from a stable sea-ice platform. No ice means no bears; it’s as simple as that. And our inattention to the GHG problem is thinning and shrinking the sea-ice at unprecedented rates.

The big question now is whether Canada's leaders are reading these signs, and whether these urgent alarm bells rung by the polar bear will be heeded as heads of state gather in Copenhagen to make decisions that will take care of GHG emissions, and hence the future of not only polar bears and sea-ice, but also the stability of our planet's climate patterns and economies. Perhaps the coal-miners could teach some of the world's leaders a few fundamental lessons about the need to pay serious attention to such biological signs, and then to take very quick actions in response!