Researchers witness the discovery of a rare polar bear, capturing a video of a female caring for a cub
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Researchers in northern Canada have witnessed a rare discovery of a polar bear, capturing video of a wild female bear caring for a cub that is not her own.
“The discovery of cubs is not uncommon for polar bears. We have documented 13 cases in our study over the past 45 years,” said Evan Richardson, a scientist with the Canadian Department of Environment and Climate Change.
The footage of a bear caring for a foster cub was captured during the annual polar bear migration Western Hudson Bay in Churchill, Manitoba, widely known as the polar capital of the world.
Canadian researchers met the mother in the spring as she left her maternity ward. He had only one child, who was marked – a common practice to help the study of people.
They met the same mother again a few weeks ago but saw the second child without an ear, Richardson told AFP.
“When we went back and looked at the data, we found out that she had adopted a second child,” he said.
The video collected by the researchers shows the cubs exploring the snow-covered landscape, the mother moving in the background, and one sequence in which one cub rushes to join the others.
Both cubs are 10 to 11 months old, and will likely stay with their mother until they are about 2.5 years old.
“When we got confirmation that this was a discovery, I had a lot of mixed feelings, but mostly positive,” said Alysa McCall, a staff scientist at Polar Bears International, in a video provided to the CBC. “It’s another reason why this species is incredible, why it’s interesting and fascinating, and it gives you a lot of hope when you realize that polar bears may be facing each other out there.”
Currently, researchers do not know what happens to the mother of the adopted child.
But having a mother’s figure increases the child’s chances of surviving to adulthood, Richardson said.
“It’s really exciting to know that this female bear is taking care of this cub and that it has a chance to survive,” said Richardson.
“These female bears are good mothers, they are ready to take care of the offspring, and if there is one cub in the tundra, screaming and crying, they just take it under their wings,” he added.
There are currently 26,000 polar bears worldwide, according to the non-profit organization Polar Bears International. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists polar bears as an endangered species, it says loss of sea ice since climate change is a major threat to their survival.
This is not the first time that wild animals have been seen with children that are not their own. Earlier this year, scientists said the video showed capuchin monkeys carrying at least 11 crying children in Panama.
At first, the researchers thought it was “a touching story of a strange capuchin taking these children,” said Zoë Goldsborough, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.
But Goldsborough said they eventually realized that kidnapping was a social custom or “fashion” among the island’s young male capuchins, and in most or all cases, the crying babies die.
