Grizzly Bears are Intruding into the Territory of Polar Bears

[GreenGrolar]

Here we have the first documented case of an adult male polar bear successfully defending his kill from a grizzly bear:

*This image is copyright of its original author

 A polar bear successfully defending a marine mammal carcass from an approaching grizzly bear, Kiask Island, 2013 (photo: Robert Rockwell).


Two observations were of grizzly bears feeding on subadult polar bears but in those cases neither observer could conclusively determine whether the grizzly bears had killed them, though the details of one case strongly suggested so. Grizzly bears are known to have killed and consumed polar bears on the sea ice in the western Arctic (Taylor, 1995) and typically dominate polar bears when they interact on shore in Alaska (Miller et al., 2015). These two observations contrast though with Rockwell’s 2013 observation of an adult male polar bear successfully deterring an approaching grizzly that appeared attracted to an unidentiable marine mammal carcass the polar bear was standing on (Fig. 2f).


The State of Knowledge about Grizzly Bears (Kakenokuskwe osow Muskwa (Cree), Ursus arctos) in Northern Manitoba


https://www.researchgate.net/publication...n_Manitoba

This is probably what happens when a polar bear loses its fear of the barren ground grizzly. Reply