Posted on December 21, 2019 |
This video tweet deserves a post of its own: two relatively inexperienced cubs-of-the-year in Russia deliberately break through thin ice, fall into the icy water and crawl back out – over and over again, for fun, as their mother watches in the background. Play is one way animals learn important survival lessons and for polar bears, this is one of them:
Bear cubs play around on ice in Russia pic.twitter.com/RhMfpV0JFJ
— RT (@RT_com) December 20, 2019
Thin ice was a natural component of the Arctic long before polar bears evolved to live there: it is nothing new but dealing with it requires a strategy that cubs must learn.
Here it is broken down as stills: one fat, Chukchi Sea cub deliberately pounces on the ice to break it:
Both crawl out of the icy water:
Both safely crawling over the thin ice:
Compare the above video to the photos and film clips below meant to frighten everyone (including small children) about the plight of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, from the UK Mirror earlier this year (13 November 2019) “Exhausted polar bears cling to life on thawing ice as they face extinction: These are the desperate polar bears scrambling for survival on Arctic sea ice shrinking beneath their very paws as climate change takes its toll“:
“Polar bears are threatened with being wiped out by climate change” Mirror, 13 Nov 2019. James Breeden photo
Propaganda-style photo distributed by USGS, taken by US Coast Guard in August 2009:
Also from 2009, is a video from the BBC, called “Polar Bear on Thin Ice – Nature’s Great Events: The Great Melt – BBC One” (10 Feb 2009), which I believe was also used as fund-raising propaganda by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF):
A 2015 pictorial in the Daily Mail (27 December) shows, through a sequence of photos taken by a crewmember of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, how a big adult male in Alaska used the same strategy for dealing with thin ice as this year’s Russian cub:
I don’t see the pics (I’m in France).
try another browser
Martin A, you CAN see polar bear pics in France:
https://www.google.com/search?q=polar+bear+pics+in+France&oq=polar+bear+pics+in+France+&aqs=chrome.
I stood watching a stoat run up the side of a tree, do a back flip, land on its feet and do it again, and again, and again.
Obviously just for fun.
Apparently the ancestors of today’s polar bears made it through the previous interglacial period, the Eemian, a period that was warmer than today with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels.
In the BBC video:
I enjoyed watching the big bear accommodate his movements as the ice started cracking.
He switched from walking with his front paws to sliding them.
Then he looked underneath the ice to see how far he had to go before the ice became thicker (or ground was near). He did this a couple of times.
He also spread his weight a bit.
All of this seems to imply that he knows what he was doing.
You’re implying that the BBC is mis-representing what the video shows. That’s simply not possible!
Oh yeah. /sarc
Weird thing. When I post a comment from this PC, it appears right away. When I post from my other PC sitting right next to it, the comment takes a long time to appear. I’ve accepted cookies on both.
Hudson Bay is almost completely frozen.
http://masie_web.apps.nsidc.org/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/latest/4km/masie_all_r10_4km.png
Getting out of a hole in the ice is not easy. A friend of mine almost didn’t make it until the drill crew, who were nearby, heard him and hauled him out.
Our dog fell through the ice a few years back. As an overfed labrador, she had a similar body shape to a bear, and was totally unable to get traction. Our cabin is on a river so the ice never gets thick enough to walk on, except in shallow bays.
We have to assume that if polar bears did not develop the skill (or the body configuration) to get out of holes in the ice, they would have gone extinct long ago, but it’s still impressive as heck to watch them do it. Perhaps not being afraid of the cold water helps.
To get out of a hole in the ice what you need is claws. Although dogs have claws, they are not the right claws. Bears can climb trees, dogs can’t.
Shoki Kaneda:
“Polar bears are smarter than liberals.”
____________________________________
Shoki Kaneda, fight for polar bears suffrage.
Polar bears have a right to vote!