Earth Equity News

Global Warming in Northwest Territories Encourages Grizzly-Polar Mating. By CBC News, April 30, 2010. "Biologists in the Northwest Territories have confirmed that an unusual-looking bear shot earlier this month near Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., was a rare hybrid grizzly-polar bear... The bear had thick white fur like a polar bear, but it also had a wide head, brown legs and brown paws like a grizzly... DNA analysis shows the bear was a second-generation hybrid... The bear was the result of a female grizzly-polar hybrid mating with a male grizzly bear… Hybrid bears will likely become more common in the North, as the direct consequence of climate change, Predicts Brendan Kelly, a marine biologist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the absence of summer Arctic sea ice, polar bears are stranded on land and come into more contact with grizzly bears, he said… 'That's going to give a lot of organisms -- a lot of marine mammals in particular -- who've been separated for at least 10,000 years the opportunity to interbreed again, and we're predicting we're going to see a lot more of that.'"