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a mother polar bear decided to adopt – a move that scientists say is extremely rare – and the new family was captured on video.
Researchers tagged the five-year-old mother, also known as “Bear X33991,” and her 10 to 11-month-old cub in the spring in the northeastern Canadian province of Manitoba. Come fall, scientists noticed that as her family grew, she was joined by another untagged cub, this time seemingly “adopted.”
The discovery, which was captured on video, is only the 13th such sighting among 4,600 bears tracked over the past 45 years in the western Hudson Bay polar bear population.
“This is unusual,” said Alyssa McCall, staff scientist at Polar Bears International.
“We don’t really know why this happens or how often it happens – but we do know it doesn’t happen often.”
However, adoption is not limited to polar bears in Canada. It has also been observed in Norway and the high Arctic, said Dr. Evan Richardson, a polar bear research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
“We have seen females raising multiple cubs, two or three cubs that are not even their own,” he said.
Although some orphaned cubs have been adopted, adoption has also been observed of cubs whose biological mothers were still alive. But, why this happens is not completely known.
“We really think it’s just because they are so maternal and are such good mothers. They can’t leave a cub crying in the tundra so they pick them up and take them with them.” Richardson said.
As for “Bear X33991” and her new cub, what exactly happened to the bear who gave birth remains a mystery. Even after researchers analyzed genetic samples taken from the cub, McCall said they would never know what happened to its biological mother.
“There’s a small chance we might figure it out, but there’s a good chance we’ll never know,” she explained.
Still, the adoption bodes well for this cub’s future. Adoption helps increase a cub’s chances of survival to adulthood, and three out of 13 cases of adoption have survived in this population of polar bears.
This may not seem like a lot, but the survival rate for any polar bear cub to adulthood is about 50 percent, with a mother helping teach the cub to hunt and surviving for about 2.5 years.
Without the mother, the little cubs have almost no chance.
Polar bears around the world – young and old – are also increasingly threatened by human-caused climate change. Due to climate change due to rising temperatures, the ice on which bears live is shrinking, making it harder to hunt and survive.
it is even Forced change in polar bear’s DNAAccording to a recent Study,
More than two-thirds of polar bears are predicted to become extinct by 2050, researchers at the UK-based University of East Anglia said.
Since these threats are already affecting the area, Richardson said the adoption is a good thing for the bears around Churchill, where he discovered the cub.
“It’s great to know that bears are looking out for each other,” he said.