Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos

[sanjay]

A great read and valuable information by Polar bear expert - Dr. Thea Bechshoft

Late one night a few summers ago, while sailing through the drift ice north of Svalbard, we came across a polar bear that was clearly deeply asleep. This prompted a lot of questions on polar bears and sleep from the guests onboard. I figured that perhaps you lot would be curious about this as well and so I thought I’d share a few words on the matter in today’s post.

Most of what we know about polar bear sleep patterns is from the summer months as this is the time when people living in the high Arctic, researchers, and tourists are more likely to journey through the realm of the polar bears. Furthermore, Arctic summer is a time of 24 hour daylight, which also makes it significantly easier to actually spot the bears and observe their behavior during this particular time of year.

So, generally speaking:
Polar bears will usually choose a dry comfortable spot with good visibility, and often use either their front paw, a block of ice or a rock as a pillow. They will often dig shallow sleeping pits (sometimes known as day beds) if they are on soft ground such as gravel, snow or sand; these polar bear beds have been measured to be about 1.5 m in diameter and up to 0.5 m in depth. During the summer, polar bears spend up to a third of their time sleeping. Researchers who observed sleeping polar bears in the wild found that the bears would sleep for 7 to 8 hours in one go. They also found that the bears had a tendency to sleep more during the day than during the night. However, as I mentioned above, the summer days have 24 hours of sunlight which makes it hard to know whether the specific time of day really made a difference to the animals or whether it was mere coincidence. Besides these longer periods of sleep, polar bears also like to take shorter naps of an hour or two – this can be any time of the day but especially after a good meal (don’t know about you, but I can definitely relate :)).

The picture below – taken by Sandra Petrowitz, a brilliant photographer and a colleague of mine - shows a polar bear sleeping in the shallow pit it has dug in the snow on the ice north of Svalbard. In addition, I stumbled across this video:

- a wonderful example of a polar bear digging out exactly such a day bed, not on the sea ice, but on the tundra outside of Churchill, Canada. Enjoy!

*This image is copyright of its original author

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