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According toLive Science, more polar bears are migrating further south — where they encounter grizzly bears — because rising temperatures have thinned the Arctic sea ice, pushing polar bears into unfamiliar territory.
Anew study, published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesfound that climate change’s effect on the bear species' habitats has also affected the animals' mating behaviors.
The findings “may have implications for our understanding of climate change impacts,” the study stated.
The “Pizzly” bear — first spotted in 2006 in the Canadian Arctic — has the “white fur of a polar bear but the long claws, humped back, shallow face and brown patches of a grizzly,” according to Live Science.
Charlotte Lindqvist, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, toldNewsweekthat researchers remain uncertain about when grizzly bears — also called brown bears — andpolar bearsbegan to interbreed.
“We know they are still able to mate today and can produce fertile offspring so they may have been mating off and on since their species split, whenever the two species came into contact,” she said.
Lindqvist added, “The older a mating event is, the more difficult it is for us to find evidence of it in today’s populations. However, from our study, we find sharing of DNA with brown bears in modern polar bears and it also involves a 115,000 to a 130,000-year-old polar bear. This suggests mating happened before the age of this ancient polar bear.”
The number of “pizzly” bears alive today remains low, according to Lindqvist, but there could be more of the hybrid bear species in the future.
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“Species evolve all the time and there is nothing to say that new species of bears won’t appear in the future, but it will likely not be in our lifetime,” the professor explained.
“And it brings up the general issue of what a species really is! What may be more likely to happen, unfortunately, is the demise of the polar bear if it continues to lose its main habitat, the Arctic sea ice,” Lindqvist said.
source: people.com
