Researchers with Polar Bears International were tracking a female polar bear in Western Hudson Bay this spring. They fitted her with a GPS collar and documented her caring for a single cub.
But then, when she was later spotted with two cubs of roughly the same age, scientists realized they were looking at something incredibly rare among polar bears: adoption.
The Washington Post reports that, out of the roughly 4,600 bears studied in the region over nearly 50 years, this is only the 13th confirmed case of a mama polar bear raising a cub that she did not birth.
The mother, identified as X33991, appears to have taken in a cub believed to be about 10 or 11 months old. Researchers think the cub may have been orphaned, possibly crying out along the coast.
According to scientists, female polar bears are biologically primed to respond to distressed cubs, even when those cubs aren’t their own.
Rare Photo Shows a Polar Bear With an ‘Adopted’ Cub
It’s a beautiful gesture when you put it in human terms. But for polar bears, adoption comes with serious risks. Raising cubs in the Arctic is a demanding job, and sometimes a deadly one.
Mothers hunt seals on sea ice through the winter and then have to endure long summers with little to no food while nursing and protecting their young. Half of all cubs don’t survive into adulthood, and based on previous adoption cases documented in this population, adoption reduces those chances of survival even more, as only three of the previously documented adopted cubs lived long-term.
The GPS data suggest that X33991 and both cubs have returned to the sea ice, where the cubs will learn to hunt and acquire all the skills needed to survive one of the harshest environments on Earth. The cubs are expected to remain with their mom for another year and a half before setting out on their own.
Churches might take some genetic samples to determine whether the adopted cubs’ biological mother is still alive, since some past cases of adoption turned out to be accidental cub swaps where even moms couldn’t distinguish their own kids amongst a sea of similar-looking polar bears.
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