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Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos

Venezuela epaiva Offline
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A Polar Bear’s canines are used to seize and control prey. The molars are slightly sharper and better at shearing flesh than those of their Grizzly Bear ancestor. The roman nose of the Polar Bear is indicated by the small bump on the gentle slope from brow to nasal opening.
Book Polar Bears A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior (Andrew E. Derocher)

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(09-17-2021, 05:18 AM)epaiva Wrote: A Polar Bear’s canines are used to seize and control prey. The molars are slightly sharper and better at shearing flesh than those of their Grizzly Bear ancestor. The roman nose of the Polar Bear is indicated by the small bump on the gentle slope from brow to nasal opening.
Book Polar Bears A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior (Andrew E. Derocher)

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*This image is copyright of its original author



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https://books.google.com.au/books?dq=the...&q&f=false
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Body Type.

Polar bears have a heavy stout body with strong muscular legs and well-developed neck muscles. Compared to other bears, the head of a polar bear is proportionally smaller. The necks of polar bears are longer than their nearest kin, the brown bear. This adaptation makes it easier for them to keep their heads above water when swimming. They have short, fur covered ears and a very short tail. Polar bears have large paws compared to body size, reaching 30 cm (12 in.) in diameter. The large paws of a polar bear act like snowshoes, spreading out the bear's weight as it moves over ice and snow. The forepaws are round, and the hind paws are elongated. The partial webbing between their toes, polar bears are able to use their front feet much like paddles to propel them rapidly through the water. The hind feet are slightly smaller. On both the front and hind feet, the bottoms are covered with dense fur, which affords better traction when moving on ice. Each toe has a thick, curved, nonretractable claw. The claws are used for grasping prey and for traction when running or climbing on ice. The sole of a polar bear's foot has thick, black pads covered with small, soft papillae (dermal bumps). The papillae create friction between the foot and ice to prevent slippage. Long hairs growing between pads and toes also help prevent slippage. Polar bears walk in a plantigrade manner (i.e., in a manner similar to humans with both heel and toe make contact with the ground when walking). On land, they are not as quick as brown bears and appear to have traded off speed for their extremely massive forelegs which they use to break through seal dens or flip a large seal out of the water. They are able to attain speeds of 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour) for short distances.


myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/~brilla/PBear.htm
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( This post was last modified: 03-27-2022, 10:09 AM by GreenGrolar )

From the Great Bear of Almanac by Gary Brown:

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https://archive.org/details/greatbearalm...4/mode/2up

Rare attack on a bowhead whale. It never happened again. Off course the whale survived.

Polar bears also has the most specialised eyes of all bears:



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( This post was last modified: 03-27-2022, 03:34 PM by GreenGrolar )

More polar bears with shoulder humps:


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(11-16-2017, 06:27 PM)Betty Wrote: Hanover, Germany. 13th Jan, 2016. Seven-year-old polar bear Nanuq stretches himself out at a measuring stick, showing off his height of 2.99 meters at the adventure zoo in Hanover, Germany, 13 January 2016. 2,061 animals of 198 species live in the Hanover Zoo, according to this year's inventory. Photo: HOLGER HOLLEMANN/dpa/Alamy Live News

http://www.parkerlebnis.de/erlebnis-zoo-hannover-inventur-2016_18852.html

http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-hanover-germany-13th-jan-2016-seven-year-old-polar-bear-nanuq-stretches-93155731.html


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He is one huge fella. Unfortunately, he has only begun to reach sexual maturity (6 years old for males). Most male polar bears are excluded from mating season till they reach 8 to 10 years of age. Like the brown bears, male polar bears become full grown between 9 to 10 years old.
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Polar bears sometimes bludgeon walruses to death with stones or ice.

It’s long been said that a piece of ice is the perfect murder weapon



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In this illustration, which appears in an 1865 book by adventurer Charles Francis Hall, a polar bear uses a rock as a tool to kill a walrus. Some have thought that Inuit reports of this behavior were just stories, but new research suggests not.

Walruses, weighing as much as 1,300 kilograms with huge tusks and nearly impenetrable skulls, are almost impossible for a hungry polar bear to kill. But new research suggests that some polar bears have invented a work-around — bashing walruses on the head with a block of stone or ice.      

For more than 200 years, Inuit in Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic have told stories of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) using such tools to aid in killing walruses. Yet explorers, naturalists and writers often dismissed such accounts, relegating them to myth along with tales about shape-shifting bears.     

The persistence of these reports, including one report from an Inuk hunter in the late 1990s, coupled with photos of a male polar bear named GoGo at a Japanese zoo using tools to obtain suspended meat compelled Ian Stirling and colleagues to investigate further.     

“It’s been my general observation that if an experienced Inuit hunter tells you that he’s seen something, it’s worth listening to and very likely to be correct,” says Stirling, one of the world’s leading polar bear biologists.

The researchers reviewed historical, secondhand observations of tool use in polar bears reported by Inuit hunters to explorers and naturalists as well as recent observations by Inuit hunters and non-Inuit researchers and documented observations of GoGo and brown bears — polar bears’ closest relatives — using tools in captivity to access food. This review suggests that tool use in wild polar bears, though infrequent, does occur in the case of hunting walruses because of their large size, the researchers report in the June Arctic.

“Really, the only species you would want to bonk on the head with a piece of ice would be a walrus,” says Andrew Derocher, director of the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who wasn’t involved with the new study. He suspects that it might just be a few polar bears that do this behavior. For example, if a mother bear figured out how to use ice or stone in this way, “it’s something her offspring would pick up on,” but not necessarily a skill polar bears across the Arctic would acquire, he says.

Among animals, using tools to solve problems has long been regarded as a marker of a higher level of what humans consider intelligence. Notoriously smart chimpanzees, for example, craft spears to hunt smaller mammals (SN: 2/28/07). Dolphins carry marine sponges in their mouths to stir sand and uncover prey (SN: 6/8/05). And elephants have been known to drop logs or large rocks onto electric fences to cut off the power supply.

Studies on the cognitive abilities of polar bears are lacking. “We don’t know anything experimental or objective at all,” Stirling says. “However, we have a great deal of observational information that tends to suggest polar bears are really smart.

Members of the bear family, Ursidae, are typically assumed to have strong cognitive skills as a result of their large brains and evidenced by their sophisticated hunting strategies. Studies on captive American black bears have even revealed some mental capabilities that appear to exceed those of primates.



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This sculpture in the Itsanitaq Museum in Churchill, Canada shows a polar bear lifting a block of ice above the head of a sleeping walrus.GLORIA DICKIE

CITATIONS

I. Stirling, K. Laidre and E. Born. Do wild polar bears (Ursus maritimus) use tools when      hunting walruses (Odobenus rosmarus)? Arctic. Vol. 74, June 2021, p. 175. doi: 10.14430/arctic72532.


https://www.sciencenews.org/article/polar-bears-bludgeon-walrus-stones-tools-ice-inuit
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( This post was last modified: 03-27-2022, 04:42 PM by GreenGrolar )


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Watch one of the episodes of 'Fear Island' to know more about this huge bear.

The largest bear on earth

This is the gigantic "Grolar bear", named 'Grandfather' ( Hybrid between Polar bear and Brown bear ) currently roaming the wilds of Alaska. This giant bear is considered to be the largest bear on earth, with prehistoric dimensions, estimated by numerous eye-witnesses to be around 12 - 14 tall and weigh around 1800 - 2000 lbs !  A true monster.
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/animalfightclub/huge-and-monstrous-bears-in-size-and-musculature-t183-s30.html#p5342
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https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-W...01/Trapped
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https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...21-02954-w
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Book:- Bears of the North

"Two begula whales killed by polar bear."



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https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=dJg9EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA89&dq=bears+of+the+north&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiY6eT3oJf1AhWRy6QKHQswA3QQ6AF6BAgEEAM#v=onepage&q=bears%20of%20the%20north&f=false
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https://books.google.com.au/books?id=dJg...x.&f=false
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication...rus_leucas


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https://books.google.it/books?id=ejIQ7EH...es&f=false


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https://books.google.it/books?id=dJg9EAA...as&f=false

More accounts of polar bear killing beluga.
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