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Post by Gorilla king on Jun 28, 2021 19:08:06 GMT -5
POLAR BEAR KILLING A BULL WALRUS:
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Post by Gorilla king on Jun 28, 2021 19:23:25 GMT -5
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arctozilla
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Post by arctozilla on Jul 23, 2021 5:25:03 GMT -5
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arctozilla
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Post by arctozilla on Jul 25, 2021 9:01:27 GMT -5
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Post by Gorilla king on Jul 29, 2021 8:36:45 GMT -5
"polar bear kills a walrus by bashing its head with a block of ice reported by Eskimos"
Up to now i had doubted this account because i thought it was just an unconfirmed "story" because of the "block of ice", naturalists and explorers also doubted these stories, UP TO NOW. Famous polar bear biologist Ian Stirling and colleagues did a study:
Polar bears sometimes bludgeon walruses to death with stones or ice
It’s long been said that a piece of ice is the perfect murder weapon
In this illustration, which appears in an 1865 book by adventurer Charles Francis Hall, a polar bear uses a rock as a tool to kill a walrus. Some have thought that Inuit reports of this behavior were just stories, but new research suggests not.
Walruses, weighing as much as 1,300 kilograms with huge tusks and nearly impenetrable skulls, are almost impossible for a hungry polar bear to kill. But new research suggests that some polar bears have invented a work-around — bashing walruses on the head with a block of stone or ice.
For more than 200 years, Inuit in Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic have told stories of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) using such tools to aid in killing walruses. Yet explorers, naturalists and writers often dismissed such accounts, relegating them to myth along with tales about shape-shifting bears.
The persistence of these reports, including one report from an Inuk hunter in the late 1990s, coupled with photos of a male polar bear named GoGo at a Japanese zoo using tools to obtain suspended meat compelled Ian Stirling and colleagues to investigate further.
“It’s been my general observation that if an experienced Inuit hunter tells you that he’s seen something, it’s worth listening to and very likely to be correct,” says Stirling, one of the world’s leading polar bear biologists.
The researchers reviewed historical, secondhand observations of tool use in polar bears reported by Inuit hunters to explorers and naturalists as well as recent observations by Inuit hunters and non-Inuit researchers and documented observations of GoGo and brown bears — polar bears’ closest relatives — using tools in captivity to access food. This review suggests that tool use in wild polar bears, though infrequent, does occur in the case of hunting walruses because of their large size, the researchers report in the June Arctic.
“Really, the only species you would want to bonk on the head with a piece of ice would be a walrus,” says Andrew Derocher, director of the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who wasn’t involved with the new study. He suspects that it might just be a few polar bears that do this behavior. For example, if a mother bear figured out how to use ice or stone in this way, “it’s something her offspring would pick up on,” but not necessarily a skill polar bears across the Arctic would acquire, he says.
Among animals, using tools to solve problems has long been regarded as a marker of a higher level of what humans consider intelligence. Notoriously smart chimpanzees, for example, craft spears to hunt smaller mammals (SN: 2/28/07). Dolphins carry marine sponges in their mouths to stir sand and uncover prey (SN: 6/8/05). And elephants have been known to drop logs or large rocks onto electric fences to cut off the power supply.
Studies on the cognitive abilities of polar bears are lacking. “We don’t know anything experimental or objective at all,” Stirling says. “However, we have a great deal of observational information that tends to suggest polar bears are really smart.”
Members of the bear family, Ursidae, are typically assumed to have strong cognitive skills as a result of their large brains and evidenced by their sophisticated hunting strategies. Studies on captive American black bears have even revealed some mental capabilities that appear to exceed those of primates.
This sculpture in the Itsanitaq Museum in Churchill, Canada shows a polar bear lifting a block of ice above the head of a sleeping walrus.GLORIA DICKIE
CITATIONS
I. Stirling, K. Laidre and E. Born. Do wild polar bears (Ursus maritimus) use tools when hunting walruses (Odobenus rosmarus)? Arctic. Vol. 74, June 2021, p. 175. doi: 10.14430/arctic72532.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/polar-bears-bludgeon-walrus-stones-tools-ice-inuit/amp
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Post by Gorilla king on Jul 29, 2021 8:39:56 GMT -5
From the post above:
That footage, Stirling says, shows a female polar bear sliding a large block of ice around before throwing it into the water at a seal.
Moment on automatic at 12:59:
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Post by Gorilla king on Jul 29, 2021 8:43:45 GMT -5
And here is the actual study:
Do Wild Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) Use Tools when Hunting Walruses (Odobenus rosmarus)?
Abstract
Since the late 1700s, reports of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) using tools (i.e., pieces of ice or stones) to kill walruses (Odobenus rosmarus) have been passed on verbally to explorers and naturalists by their Inuit guides, based on local traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as well as accounts of direct observations or interpretations of tracks in the snow made by the Inuit hunters who reported them. To assess the possibility that polar bears may occasionally use tools to hunt walruses in the wild, we summarize 1) observations described to early explorers and naturalists by Inuit hunters about polar bears using tools, 2) more recent documentation in the literature from Inuit hunters and scientists, and 3) recent observations of a polar bear in a zoo spontaneously using tools to access a novel food source. These observations and previously published experiments on brown bears (Ursus arctos) confirm that, in captivity, polar and brown bears are both capable of conceptualizing the use of a tool to obtain a food source that would otherwise not be accessible. Based on the information from all our sources, this may occasionally also have been the case in the wild. We suggest that possible tool use by polar bears in the wild is infrequent and mainly limited to hunting walruses because of their large size, difficulty to kill, and their possession of potentially lethal weapons for both their own defense and the direct attack of a predator.
FIG. 2. Five-year-old GoGo, a male polar bear in Tennoji Zoological Gardens, Osaka, Japan, using tools to access a food source suspended above his reach. Panels show GoGo (a) throwing a piece of plastic pipe, (b) holding a 2 m piece of tree branch, (c) using a small log and, (d) throwing a small dense buoy-shaped tool using both forepaws at the same time (Photos © Tennoji Zoological Gardens, Osaka, Japan).
journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/arctic/article/view/72532/54935
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Jul 29, 2021 10:28:59 GMT -5
Polar bears are intelligent animals indeed. Looks like the blue ice bear is good at using weapons too 😄.
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arctozilla
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Post by arctozilla on Jul 30, 2021 11:12:24 GMT -5
Interesting, that has been just a plot twist to me sending an account who looks unreliable due of the polar bear killing the walrus by throwing a block of ice on its head and then finding out that polar bears can use tools.
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Jul 31, 2021 7:11:32 GMT -5
I personally think a polar bear is capable of killing a bull walrus at that weight if the latter has no water to escape too. However, it is going to be extremely tough.
Graah posted a video of a polar bear which killed a walrus which had isolated itself from the rest of the herd due to sickness.
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Sept 4, 2021 11:26:04 GMT -5
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Sept 11, 2021 9:10:56 GMT -5
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arctozilla
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Post by arctozilla on Sept 13, 2021 5:04:08 GMT -5
Here's National Geographic saying that polar bears can hunt walruses and belugas. 1:39 “This hefty size allows polar bears to hunt large and powerful animals like walruses and beluga whales.”
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Post by Gorilla king on Nov 30, 2021 13:36:44 GMT -5
Book, Bears of the North, a Year Inside Their Worlds, by wildlife photographer, naturalist, and bestselling author Wayne Lynch:
Over a nine-year span, Calvert found evidence of 10 walruses that she believed were wounded or killed by polar bears in the winter and early spring. The study concluded that polar bears may kill more walruses than has been preaviously suspected, an although calves and subadult animals are most vulnerable, large male polar bears are capable of also killing adult male walruses.
An Inuit hunter from Grise Fiord watched a polar bear attack a solitary muskox on the ice between Ellesmere island and Devon island, and in northeastern Greenland there are several reports of polar bears attacking and killing muskoxen, most often lone adult bulls.books.google.com/books?id=dJg9EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA86&dq=Polar+bear+killed+bull+musk+ox.&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjU5svR2MD0AhXs4HMBHa4BB_EQ6AF6BAgLEAM
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arctozilla
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Post by arctozilla on Dec 4, 2021 2:41:46 GMT -5
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Post by Gorilla king on Dec 5, 2021 20:37:27 GMT -5
Interactions between Polar Bears and Overwintering Walruses in the Central Canadian High Arctic
Abstract and Figures
There are few records of predation by polar bears (Ursus maritimus) on walruses (Odobenus rosmarus), although their distributions overlap extensively. During the late winter and early spring from 1981 through 1989, we recorded interactions between polar bears and walruses in the central Canadian High Arctic, where walrus movements are severely restricted in the winter by limited areas of open water for breathing and haulout holes. Predatory behaviour of bears and anti-predator behaviour of walruses were observed. We found evidence that polar bears made wounding but non-fatal attacks on 3 walruses, killed 3 walruses, and probably killed 4 others. One walrus was frozen out of its breathing hole and vulnerable to predation. Although the vulnerability of walruses to polar bear predation would vary with habitats and seasons, it is clear that polar bears are important predators of walruses in the central Canadian High Arctic in late winter-early spring.
www.researchgate.net/publication/261827346_Interactions_between_Polar_Bears_and_Overwintering_Walruses_in_the_Central_Canadian_High_Arctic
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Post by Gorilla king on Dec 5, 2021 20:44:01 GMT -5
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Dec 6, 2021 7:11:52 GMT -5
I like the picture above. It is a young polar bear on a walrus kill.
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Post by Montezuma on Dec 10, 2021 4:24:46 GMT -5
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Post by oldindigosilverback on Dec 10, 2021 6:00:38 GMT -5
/\ The source you posted is interesting. While the male polar bear outmatches the walrus in agility and has the weapons to eventually kill even a bull, even a female walrus has enough defenses to protect its vitals and eventually escape to sea.
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