Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos

[sanjay]

Here is another awesome information about Polar bear bite force by my favorite Polar bear expert Thea Bechshoft

Question by Andrew: How strong/powerful is a polar bear? Has anyone managed to crunch some numbers?
Answer By Dr Thea:
Most of what we know about polar bear strength comes from behavioral observations, but more on that later. First: yes, there are in fact a couple of scientific studies on polar bear strength. One study investigated bite force in all bear species and found that polar bears had a marginally stronger bite than the other (extant) bears, mainly due to its generally bigger body size. Also notable, the polar bears’ bite force was still lower than that of other carnivores, e.g. big cats, likely due to differences in prey and evolution. The other study investigated the structural strength of computer modeled polar bear skulls compared to brown bear/grizzly skulls. Results of the computer simulation showed that polar bear skulls were the structurally weaker of the two. However, this is more interesting in regards to evolution that it is to the bears’ everyday lives – skulls are surprisingly elastic, and polar bears mainly eat blubber and other soft foods that offer little resistance.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many behavioral observations that add to our knowledge of the strength and power of polar bears. For example, polar bears:

1. can kill with a blow of their dinner-plate sized paw. Also, speaking of hunting, they can easily pull a seal of up to 200-300 kg or even a beluga whale(!) out of the water and drag it along on the sea ice as they wish. This is mainly due to their large jaw muscles as well as the muscles and ligaments that support the head and help them attain an incredible pulling force.

2. specializations which are visible on the skulls if you know what to look for: polar bear skulls have two crests, one along the midline on the top of the skull (the saggital crest) and one across the back of the skull (the occipital crest). The first one is where the large jaw muscles attach; the second one is where the neck muscles and ligaments attach. Both are bigger in males than in females, meaning that males can handle bigger prey. You can just about see them on the skull I am holding in the picture below.

3. the largest polar bear in the collection at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway (where I did my M.Sc. way back when).

4. are incredibly strong swimmers. Longest swim on record is 687 km over the course of 9 days, but swims of an average of 100 km over 3 days are not unusual. The bears can also dive for up to at least 3 min 10 s without surfacing to breathe.

5. can easily tear through cabin walls two of many existing stories:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3584210.stm
http://wasillaalaskaby300.squarespace.co...r-doo.html

*This image is copyright of its original author

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