Sad news about polar bears

I mean, calling this sad is a major understatement. Sort of like saying that Jupiter is sort of big. Heart breaking.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.

Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth.

Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study's principal author, Steven Amstrup of the
U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center.

more: http://tinyurl.com/php4n

What's really sad is mass cannibalism pushes them into eventual extinction. :(

Actually this could force them to bread with southern grizzles; can you imagine a madcow type bear grizzly/polar hybrid? More like a monster than a bear!

Thought you might like this. I remembered seeing it a couple of weeks ago...

Bear facts: DNA confirms polar-grizzly hybrid shot
TORONTO — A DNA test has confirmed what zoologists, hunters and aboriginal trackers in the far northern reaches of Canada have dreamed of for years: the first documented case of a grizzly-polar bear in the wild.
Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker from the Northwest Territories, suspected the American hunter he was guiding had shot a hybrid bear after noticing its white fur was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly.
Territorial officials seized the bear's body and a DNA test from Wildlife Genetics International, a lab in British Columbia, confirmed the hybrid was born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father.

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/05-06/05-12-06/06world-nation.htm
Lots of other reports if searching Google news "polar grizzly hybrid".

there could be an animated sitcom in it...

a DNA test from Wildlife Genetics International, a lab in British Columbia, confirmed the hybrid was born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father.

to paraphrase cleavon little: "...where the white bears at?"

I wonder if what's happening to the polar bears is predicting our own future as well.

...These forewarnings have been occurring with greater frequency over the last half century.

My only advice would be to get used to it...along with the denials of the bigger picture from other homo sapiens. If you're lucky, you are over 50 years-old right now otherwise, you're going to see some really ugly stuff before you die.

And I have young children. I worry about their future a lot. I try to cut the difference between preparing them for the fact that their future is going to look a lot different than the way things are now without scaring the crap out of them.

Pretty much all of my life, I have always known that my grandparents were the ones who had it comparatively easy. They're too young to remember the Great Depression, were raising their families during the post-WWII boom era, and have had a traditional retirement and good access to medical care. Between the economy, the environment, the finite nature of oil, etc. I have no illusions that my life will be anywhere near as comfortable.

I will see this happening before I departure from this world.

maybe even ten. Even the scientists I know who have been studying climate change for over 40 years are shocked by how swiftly the changes are coming now. :-(

....due to increased open water....they can swim great distances, but not great enough, now, evidently - or maybe they are weakened by starvation, too...

I really hate reading this stuff...doubt very much either the tiger in the wild or the polar bear will make it even to mid-century, rate things are going, and who knows how many other creatures as we savage every landscape and sea on the face of the earth....

we all keep working and working and donating and writing and the world goes merrily on its way to hell

something i've wondered about...i imagine it gets just too damn cold?

I was prepared to answer that question until I realized who it was posing the question.

it seems that with the penguin colonies, there'd be plenty of prey...

i imagine a couple of things- although there was once one large land mass, things split apart early on, and while bears evolved in the northern climes, ultimately the climate and the isolation didn't provide for enough bioversity to evolve and sustain large animal populations.
like i said- ultimately it's just too fucking cold.

btw- they just found that huge impact crater in/near atarctica that may have resulted in a mass extinction and the break-up of pangea...i was also wondering- since the impact was supposedly at/toward the southern pole- would that also explain why most of the earth's land mass can be found in the northern hemisphere? because of the forces of that particular impact?

Bears are found in the Northern Hemisphere because that's from whence they sprang, so to speak. The evolution of the modern bear is, in terms of the evolutionary timeline, rather recent and happened loooong after the breakup of the supercontinent, pangaea.

This is one of the best summaries of the evolution of the bear: http://www.geol.umd.edu/~candela/pbevol.html

Here is a timeleine map of continental drift: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://geology.com/pangea.htm&h=686&w=550&sz=100&tbnid=n2ot6toZphLNiM:&tbnh=137&tbnw=109&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpangea&start=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=1

The issue of a (meteor) strike having anything to do with the breakup of pangaea is debatable, although I wish the area lent itself to a real scientific study.

Antarctica seperated from South America 40 million years ago, the first bears evolved from racoon-like ancestors 20 million years ago in Europe. Polar bears evolved from Alaskan brown bears around 2 million years ago

to feast upon the chewy chewy penguins... was ultimately due to isolation and FUCKING COLD not being able to support the type of plant/animal life needed to sustain the evolution of large animal populations.

http://www.awi-bremerhaven.de/AWI/Presse/PM/pm05-2.hj/050915PolSerengeti-e.html

"In analogy to the large fish stocks in African lakes being dependent on hippos, large mammals may also control their environment in the coldest oceans on earth. It is already clear that the notion of short food chains with few organisms represents an oversimplified view of polar ecosystems. in the productivity of the Arctic and Antarctic is comparable to temperate oceans. However, large differences exist between the Arctic and Antarctic with regard to nutrient availability and key species in the food chain. In the Antarctic, availability of iron is the primary growth-limiting factor in the system."

As an aside, some of the largest mammals known find Antartica a virtual paradise. It's just that bears aren't one of those species. The ecosystems of the Artic and Antartica are quite different, despite the fact that they share a numbingly cold climate. Expecting them to share the same flora and fauna because they are both cold is like wondering why we don't find the same ecosystem in the Amazon as we do in the Sahara, or even the Sahara and Death Valley.

being creatures of the ocean, they wouldn't find the actual continent of antarctica too inviting.

Or was I just spinning my wheels trying to answer your questions in a rational manner?

I believe I explained why bears are not found outside the Northern Hemisphere and why the ecosystems of the opposite polar regions are quite different in the kind of life they can sustain. There are actually few large mammals in the northern polar regions inhabited by the Polar Bear, other than some species of seals and walruses. Large seal populations can also be found in the Antarctic as well, including elephant seals. But since there are no large bear species in the Southern Hemisphere, killer whales are the main predator of the seal population.

If you have another point please raise it in a forthcoming manner. Otherwise I consider this to be yet another instance of pointless, contentious posturing and will let you continue talking to yourself.

:cry: We people did that and continue to contribute
to climate change . Both my husband and myself have
a goal to go electric locally . We will have to keep
one gas burning vehicle for my husband's work but will
work toward bio- diesel.

...Chances are the electricity you use comes from burning fossil fuels, too.

I just got back from LA on business but stayed a day to drive down and visit my fav zoo. All, the while I was watching this incredibly active and playful enormous male play with his floatable plastic "ice berg"-- that he would drag into the water, toss about, and dive under--I was near tears thinking that soon we would be losing his relatives in the wild--and all because our political asshole "leadership" have CHOSEN to look the other way to line their own coffers. It is just heart breaking added to heart-breaking.

I guess I understand why so many people choose to remain ignorant (even though they must know on some level what is going on). All of us who have been glued to DU and the progressive blogs since January, 2001 are becoming overcome with the intense and very comprehensive knowledge of worldwide horror being committed in our names.


'Guess I better turn in early. I sound about ready to lose it and in truth, I probably am. :banghead:

...It's all of us contributing to this. We're all in it together.

And the evidence as to what is coming has been there long before 2001. Those of us who looked at the entirety of human history, our actions and courses, saw this on the horizon decades past. In utmost honesty, the seeds for it were planted millenia ago.

While politics are a portion of the scenario, they're nowhere nearly as integral as plain old human behavior.

the Kyoto Protocol means nothing to these thugs who abuse power. they will burn in hell.

We've been approaching planetary ruin ever since the first immigrants began chopping down the original forests. Of course, the Industrial revolution picked up the pace, but everyone thought it was a good thing at the time. We are already paying for our parent's excesses. Each generation will pay a higher price.

it could be worse.

Is going to be one mean SOB.:evilgrin:

after he runs out of Polar Bears?