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Bear Planet Poll
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What you think when is okay to kill bears?
Total votes: 3996
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Polar Bear
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Polar Bear (also known as nanook, nanook of the north or great white bear) is a noble-looking animal and of enormous strength,
living bravely warm amid eternal ice... They are the
unrivaled master-existences of this icebound solitude. They will never
attack a man unless it's hungry or unless someone aggravating him. It's
people that aggravate a bear...
Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) is descended from brown bear
ancestors that became permanently bleached and reshaped by the harsh environment
north of the Artic Circle (polar bear habitat).
The polar bear swim like be born in water and are indeed an excellent swimmer, with a long neck, powerful sloping shoulders,
padling membranes that web half the length of its forepaws and a thick, oily fur that
sheds seawater ad helps insulate the bear against the cold.
The polar bear can without resting 80 km by ice-cold water to swim.
The polar bear weight more than 681 ilograms but its still astonishingly agile.
Under the skin sits a layer of fat, similar with the bacon of sea mammals. At the beginning of the winter
can be that thicker than 10 cm. This bacon layer ensures both warmth heat isolation and for float capacity at swimming.
Like most other bears, it spend most of its waking hours hunting food to fuel its
imense body and to build up a thick layer of protective fat to keep it warm
in icy winds and water and to serve as sustenance during the long Arctic winter night.
White bear is also extremely curious,
an intelligent and crafty animal thats cursed with intense curiosity.
This may lead the bear to find easily new sources of food,
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Polar Bear cubs (baby polar bear)
Most female polar bears mate at the age of four or five and some have
cubs until they are 25 years old. Females leave thier baby when they are only
one and a half years old and have cubs every second year. Most female have twins.
Very young and mothers and very old ones often only have a single cub. And one percent of all
polar bears has triplets.
Polar bear cubs nurse frequently and grow quickly. When they are 26 days old,
they begin to hear; at 33 days their eyes open.
When they are two months old (polar bear cubs picture below), the cubs
weight 5.5 to 7.0 kilograms. They play and romp and sometimes one can
hear them squeal.
On other side mother is sleepy and indulgent but if any danger threatens, she
is immedately wide awake. The mother nurses the cubs for at least a year,
but the cubs also share her meals. They watch her hunt and they begin to hunt themselves.
About 40% females leave their cubs when they are only one and a half years old.
If they hunt easily these youngsters have a good chance to survive.
Polar bear hunting
"The polar bear is victim of a peculiar, and particularly repulsive ,
expression of man's egotism," noted the New York Times in a
1965 editorial. "Wealthy men have taken to hunting bears in Alaska from airplanes...
This kind of hunt is about sporting as machine-gunning a cow. Its only purpose is
to obtain the bear's fur as a trophy for the floor or wall of someone's den."
In Alaska until 1950, only Inuit hunted polar bears, and they rarely took more than
120 a year. That year sports hunting began, and it soon gained worldwide notoriety because
the bears were hunted with planes. The principal requisite for this hunt was money.
For $3000 at first, and soon for double and triple that sum, the hunter was assured a bear, for the method
of hunting the bears gave them no hope for escape. Two planes took off together and flew far
out over the pack ice. When a bear was spotted, the hunter's plane landed and the other plane drove the bear
to within easy shooting distance. Often both planes simply chased the bear until it collapsed.
Then the sportsman landed and shot the bear. In 1965, the hunters killed about 300 bears and 400 in 1966.
Today are polar bear protected and their status, At the recommendation of the IUCN Polar Bear Group, is "Vulnerable".
Marine Mammal Act signed by Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States must give polar bears
protection that they never has on past.
Mystic and Spiritual polarbear world fact
Upon remote SIberian beatch, the Russian scientist S.M. Uspensky found polar bear skulls,
carefully stacked in piles several feet high, where long ago arctic men prayed to the spirit
of the bear. The Ket, a tribe of central Siberia, regarded the bear as their ancestor. They too,
set up the bear skull in the fork of a treeand to this day the Ket call the bear gyp,
"grandfather," or qoi, "stepfather".
Neanderthal man and arctic man lived in the deely mystic and spiritual world of the hunter who
must kill in order to live. The Inuit ( a member of the Inuit people.The term Inuit has official status in Canada, and is also used elsewhere as a synonym for Eskimo in general.
However, this latter use, in including people from Siberia who are not Inupiaq-speakers, is, strictly speaking, not accurate)
believed that all animals and man had inua, "souls" and to ensure future hunting success and harmony with the spirits
of nature, it was essential to placate the souls of slain animals, especially an animal as huge and man-like
as the bear, who could stand upright, like an enormous hairy giant, or who, skinned, with his pinkish blubber, his finger-like claws and massive torso
, looked gruesomely, horrifyngly likean immense naked human.
In this spiritual world of early artic man, animals were kin, an ancient belief reflected in toemism and in fables and mythology.
It was a mental world where the real and the unreal, the factual and the spiritual,
merged.A shaman of the Polar Inuit explained an unsuccessful polar bear hunt in an area where bears were usually numerous, like this:"
The bears are not here, because there is not ice here, and there is no ice here, because the wind is
to strong, and the wind is too strong because we have insulted the spirits.
The polar bear was the ultimate bear, white, huge, mysterious. The Jesuit missonary Bellarmine Lafortune noted in the
1930 "A polar bear was hunted on foot and hunter's greates prestige came from his success as a polar bear hunter".
It was an extremely risky hunt. The ice often drifted away and "many a King Islander, hot in pursuit of a polar
bear, was cut of from his home in this way; some returned safely but others disappeared forever.
When a hunter returned with a bear, ancient ceremonies were observed to propitiate the bear's soul.
for during all this time, spirit of the great white bear hovered unseen, but strangely felt, about the village.
If ofended, it would depart in anger, and evil might strike the entire community. The bear's skull
was taken to the kagri, the communula house, and placed upon a raised bench. It remained in this place
of honor untul the polar bear dance. Gifts were placed near the bear skul: skin scrapers, needle cases and ulus,
the semi-lunar woman's knife, if the bear was a female, and a carving knife or drill, if the bear was a male.
The gifts had their own spirits and essence, and these became the property of the bear's inua, its soul.
To absorb the magic power of the bear, many Inuit wore amulets, most often a bear tooth as a pendant.
The Inuit shaman needed more; he wanted the bear's spirit to be his tornaq, his magic helper.
It was a quest fraught with enormous danger. The bear spirit, the "flying bear" could take the shaman to the moon,
or deep into the sea, to seek help for his people, the mother of seals and whales and walruses. And the bear
spirit could protect his master from the power of evil.
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Polar Bear Attack
Polar Bear information (Bears and Man)
The bears are usually friendly and rarely attack without serious provocation.
But hungry bears are nervous and irritable and driven by hunger, their behavior is
erratic, unpredictable and they can be dangerous. Thats are often young bears (inexperienced hunters) and
old bears. If they attack then it is suprisingly fast. Sometimes it attacks in long,
cat-like jumps, without uttering a sound, or perhaps groaning. The bear becomes a tremendous
concentration of strength and power, and there is little time left for escape.
Polar bear's hunts in various ways but the main source of high-fat diet
is the blubber of Arctic seals. He has been known to paddle as far as 25 miles to
reach a likely hunting place.
They smell farther than they see and the polar bear's hearing is also extremly accute.
The sense of vision, though, appears to be poor in polar bear. Thats because
the bears are probably myopic.
Polar Bears Enemy
Despite the polar bear's awesome size, it does not live
completly free of danger. Large seals, nimbler in the water than the bears, sometimes
harry and nip at a swimming polar bear, and Arctic wolves on the mainland may try to
seperate a mother bear from her young. But though man is its worst enemy,
the only animal a polar bear really fears is the walrus. Powerful and belligerent,
the ivory-tusked walrus is more than a match for the polar bear.
They are at constant enmity with the Walrus and frequenty both
the combatants perish in the conflict
If a bear knows that
a walrus is in the water nearby, it will not go in because if they do meet in the walrus's
attack element, the bear is likely to be the loser. The sea mammal driving its ivory
tusks teir full length into the bear. Sometimes the bear has time
to make an attack in return for a similar attack before the tusks kill. Because
of that the bodies of a bear and a walrus have been found a several time locked
together in death.
However on the dry land the polar bear attack is usually fatal for walrus.
Polar Bear pictures (attacks)
Polar Bears Spirit
The most famous spirit bears was found at Alernerk near the present village
of Igloolik in the Canadian Arctic. It is carven from ivory, 6 inches long, and it was made
about 1,500 years a go. The bear's body is elongated. It seems to fly. It is incised with a
stylized skeleton and in its neck is a tiny compartment with a sliding cover which once may
have held red ocher. It probably depicts the spirit helper of a shaman.
Old men in the north still speak with respect of nanook, the great white bear.
But the world magic, when men and bear belonged to one realm, has enden. Southern man,
whose culture swept the north and swept away its ancient beliefs, had no reverence for bears.
To him bear was a foe to satisfy the age-old craving of the mighty exotica. He caught the bear,
baited it and often killed it with friendish cruelty, and he slaughtered it in hecatombs to
amuse the plebs. During one famous day in 237 A.D. in the Colosseum, while 50,000 specators
jeered and cheered, gladiators killed more than 1,000 bears, a spectacle sponsored by an immensely wealthy
ROman who later became Emperor Gordian I.
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Polar Bear Facts
- Name: Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Chordata
- Subphylum: Vertebrata
- Class: Mammalia
- Subclass: Theria
- Order: Carnivora
- Family: Ursidae
- Age at Maturity: 3 o 5 years
- Length of life: 20 - 30 years in the wild.
- Size: 130 to 190 cm
- Weight: 400 to 600 kg males
200 to 300 kg females
- Habitat: Annual ice adjacent to shorelines throughout the circumpolar Arctic
- Diet: Seals, narwhals, walruses, belugas, grass, kelp and berries
- Gestation: 6 to 9 months
- Cubs: Average 2
- SubFamily: Ursinae
- Genus: Ursus
- Distribution: Throughout the circumpolar Artctic, as far south as Newfoundland
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