Friday Fun Stuff: Is this a Grizzly, or a Polar Bear?

In this undated photo provided by the Canadian Wildlife Service, hunter Jim Martell, left, is seen with a hybrid bear he shot while on a hunting expedition on Banks Island, Northwest Territory, Canada. According to Dr. Ian Stirling, researcher for the CWS, genetic tests showed the bear had a polar bear for a mother and a grizzly bear for a father. Roger Kuptana, center, right, was the guide on the expedition. The other men are unidentified. (AP Photo/Canadian Wildlife Service)

This is a fascinating story. I would have never expected the idea of a grizzly bear mating with a polar bear--two different species of bear living in two different environmental habitats in the wild? But, as this story points out, the DNA tests confirm it--we've got a "grizzlar bear." Or is it a polzzly bear?" This is from Yahoo News:

TORONTO - A DNA test has confirmed what zoologists, hunters and aboriginal trackers in the far northern reaches of Canada have dreamed of for years: the first documented case of a grizzly-polar bear in the wild.

Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker from the Northwest Territories, suspected the American hunter he was guiding had shot a hybrid bear after noticing its white fur was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly.

Territorial officials seized the bear's body and a DNA test from Wildlife Genetics International, a lab in British Columbia, confirmed the hybrid was born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father.

"It's something we've all known was theoretically possible because their habitats overlap a little bit and their breeding seasons overlap a little bit," said Ian Stirling, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton, Alberta. "It's the first time it's known to have happened in the wild."

A combo photo of a polar bear on the edge of the Hudson Bay near the city of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada(L) and a US Fish and Wildlife Service picture of two Grizzly bears. A US hunter in Canada's far north may have killed the first Grizzly-Polar bear cross ever discovered in the wild, officials told AFP.(AFP/HO/File)

He said the first person to realize something was different about the bear — shot and killed last month on the southern end of Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea — was Kuptana, the guide.

"These guides know their animals and they recognized that there were a number of things that didn't look quite right for a polar bear," Stirling told The Associated Press. The bear's eyes were ringed with black, its face was slightly indented, it had a mild hump to its back and long claws.

Stirling said polar bears and grizzlies have been successfully paired in zoos and that their offspring are fertile, but there had been no documented case in the wild.

Colin Adjun, a wildlife officer in Kugluktuk on the northern mainland in western Nunavut, said he's heard stories about an oddly colored bear cavorting with polars.

"It was a light chocolate color along with a couple of polar bears," Adjun said. Though people have talked about the possibility of a mix, "it hasn't happened in our area," he said.

Three years ago, a research team spotted a grizzly on uninhabited Melville Island, 215 miles north of where Martell bagged his crossbreed.

Polar bears on the Beaufort Sea coast within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a photo dated December 21, 2005. Polar bears and hippos have joined the ranks of species threatened with extinction from climate change, unregulated hunting and other man-made dangers, a leading environmental agency said on Tuesday. (HANDOUT/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska Image Library/Reuters)

Polar bear and grizzly territories also overlap in the Western Arctic around the Beaufort Sea, where the occasional grizzly is known to head onto the sea ice looking for food after emerging from hibernation. Some grizzly bears make it over the ice all the way to Banks Island and Victoria Island, where they have been spotted and shot.

That might explain how a grizzly got to the region, but few can explain how it managed to get along with a polar bear long enough to mate.

David Paetkau, a geneticist with Wildlife Genetics, said the hybrid bear could be an anomaly. He said that if the two types of bear continue to mate, it would water down the breeds. He also said that scientists worry melting ice caps in the Arctic could soon have a detrimental impact on polar bears, which thrive in an icy environment.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, there are about 1,200 grizzlies in the lower 48 United States, 32,000 in Alaska, and 25,000 in Canada. Stirling said there are some 24,000 polar bears in Canada, Greenland, Russia and Alaska.