Bear Size ~

[Polar]

I've only been up to the Arctic/Sub-Arctic twice (2008 and 2013, respectively): one for a Coca-Cola volunteering program and another one for a Polar Bear International tour, and to be honest, I never had much interest in these animals before then like I definitely do now. One population of polar bears I would like to remark about would be the Foxe Basin Polar Bear. This habitat contains very diverse and large prey (belugas and walrus reserves on ice flows), and prey migration during the summer (apparently one of the safest ways Bowhead whales can take due to extreme water depth; less chances for other carnivores to ambush whale calves above water), as a result, the polar bear population thrives here. Here, the polar bears are huge. They usually weigh on the uppermost part of the polar bear's average weight (1150-1250 pounds).

One thing I noticed is that they look more like their brown bear counterparts in facial structure and robusticity than polar bears of other populations (I've visited the Churchill population during my 2008 trip, and the Foxe Basin and inner Baffin population in 2013.) They look more like their ancient predecessors, the Pleistocene Polar Bears. From what I saw (47 males old and young, 28 females), most of them possessed curved foreheads, the young ones had such a thicker chest for a polar bear of the same age in other populations, and all of them had a very wide skull relative to their skull length. The Foxe Basin populations of polar bears might be an exact redefinition of the Pleistocene Polar Bear, just smaller. Reply