Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos

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Question from Jor-El: "What do polar bears smell like?"

Answer from Dr. Thea Bechshoft: Jor-El, what a brilliant question! I wondered the same myself for years and so the first time I was close to a sedated polar bear, the first thing I did was to bury my face in its fur and take a good whiff

Unlike for example dogs, cats, horses or sheep, the smell of a polar bear is incredibly subtle. If I were to compare it to anything (and I’ve given this quite a bit of thought), it would be…hmm....imagine you’ve been going for a long walk along the oceanside on a really windy day. The smell of your clean, non-perfumed, windblown hair when you come back inside is the closest I can come, believe it or not. There are a number of reasons why polar bears don’t smell like very much, but primarily:

1) Most polar bears spend their entire lives on the sea ice, a very neutral smelling environment (water, ice, snow),

and

2) polar bears don’t have territories to defend like most other carnivores. Hence, they don’t need to scent-mark their particular area. Not by smelling strongly themselves and not by making themselves smell strongly by rolling in smelly things like e.g. dogs to.

Finally, a wet polar bear will have a slightly more noticeable smell than a dry bear, and a polar bear that’s in the middle of eating a seal will smell strongly of the prey. Similarly, a bear that is forced to spend its summer on land instead of on the sea ice (as for example the bears in Hudson Bay, Canada) may smell of wet peat, berries, or fermented algae - mostly though, they simply smell like dry sand. I also imagine that a polar bear with an upset stomach or an adult female who has spent the past 3 months in the den with her newborn cub may well have a somewhat stronger smell.

If you want to read more related to this topic, have a look at these links: on the polar bear’s sense of smell http://bit.ly/1DQ730r, on their nose and skull http://bit.ly/YESluB, and on the two types of hair their fur is made up of http://bit.ly/1M0uPzy.

*This image is copyright of its original author

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