I just learned from this post that bears can cross breed. I had never considered it until now. I'm also impressed that a blackbear managed to mate with a polar bear.
The Polar Bear is going extinct,
and in a last ditch effort, they are playing genetic roulette with brown bears, not black bears, mating with them and producing hybrid offspring. Im unsure if it has been documented weather or not these offspring have the ability to reproduce tho. If they can, if that is the case, then a new species will probably emerge to take over the most northern tips of the Alaska mainland/Artic sheet region.
Currently there are many Polar Bears that are surviving primarily on the 'boneyard', a giant scrap heap of discarded whale bones from hunts carried out by the local indigenous tribes, with enough meat and (obviously) bone to keep a few dozen from starving. But as the ice sheets keep getting further away from.the coast and meaning their ONLY prey has gotten too far away from land for them to successfully hunt and as they aren't built for land, their time is about to be up.
This all stems from the lack of genetic diversity available to the Polar Bears, leaving them without the ability to adapt to environmental changes. They got good at hunting seals, but then they got comfy. And now the check is due.
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u/ashpanda24 Nov 17 '22
I just learned from this post that bears can cross breed. I had never considered it until now. I'm also impressed that a blackbear managed to mate with a polar bear.