Stunningly bad science
There is a photo making the rounds of an adult polar bear killing and eating a juvenile.
The BBC
has it on their website:
Polar bear 'cannibalism' pictured
It is an image that is sure to shock many people.
An adult polar bear is seen dragging the body of a cub that it has just killed across the Arctic sea ice.
Polar bears normally hunt seals but if these are not available, the big predators will seek out other sources of food - even their own kind.
The picture was taken by environmental photojournalist Jenny Ross in Olgastretet, a stretch of water in the Svalbard archipelago.
"This type of intraspecific predation has always occurred to some extent," she told BBC News.
"However, there are increasing numbers of observations of it occurring, particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change."
Carnivores who maintain a 'harem' do this all the time. A new male displaces the old male and will frequently kill the off the children of the old male -- this way the new male gets to propagate his genetics (the females go into heat again).
From the WikiPedia
entry for Lions:
...when one or more new males oust the previous male(s) associated with a pride, the conqueror(s) often kill any existing young cubs, perhaps because females do not become fertile and receptive until their cubs mature or die...
And from the WikiPedia
entry for Polar Bear:
Adult male bears occasionally kill and eat polar bear cubs, for reasons that are unclear.
The citation for this comes from this 1999 paper (PDF):
Infanticide and Cannibalism of Juvenile Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus)
in Svalbard so the news is not even new...
Like I said, stunningly bad science. The word they are looking for is "political agenda"
Posted by DaveH at December 8, 2011 2:51 PM