Hunter kills rare "Pizzly" or "Grolar" bear in Canada
CANADA - They're called "pizzly" or "grolar" bears and they're so rare according to the Huffington Post that only a few sightings have been confirmed in the wild. In fact, no one can say for sure how many of these bears truly exist.
Until about 10 years ago, few believed that the hybrid grizzly-polar bear existed in the wild at all, the Huffington Post reports.
But 25-year-old hunter Didji Ishalook shot and killed one of the rare bears in Canada earlier this month.
"It looks like a polar bear but it's got brown paws and big claws like a grizzly," Ishalook told the Guardian. "And the shape of a grizzly head."
Samples of the bear's DNA have been sent out for testing, the Huffington Post reports, but experts believe they already know the outcome.
"I think it's 99 per cent sure that it's going to turn out to be a hybrid," Ian Stirling, an emeritus research scientist with Environment Canada, told The Toronto Star.
According to the Star, the bear was killed legally as part of a program that allows Inuit to practice subsistence hunting.
Stirling said that it can take several days for female bears to being ovulating.
"The fact that a grizzly and polar bear are mating tells you that they're hanging out," he told the Star. "This isn't just a casual one-night stand kind of thing."
Nunatsiaq News says that the name of the hybrid bear depends on the father. If the father is a grizzly, the cub is a grolar. If the father is a polar bear, it's a pizzly.
Experts are brainstorming reasons for the seemingly increasing number of hybrid bears, as sightings become more common.
"With climate change, grizzly bears are moving further north, so there is more overlap between grizzly bears and polar bears in terms of their range," bear expert Dave Garshelis of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources told the CBC. "There are even American black bears that are moving further north. And a few black bears have been spotted outside of Arviat."
However, others are not so sure.
"We can't say specifically, 'this is because of climate change,'" Nunavut carnivore biologist Malik Awan told Nunatsiaq News. "There's many possible reasons. For example, there's a lot going on in grizzly habitat in the South like habitat change, loss and fragmentation."
The increasing number of these hybrids could be bad news for the polar bear, which is vulnerable.
According to a 2010 report in nature, hybridization "can be the final straw in loss of species," National Geographic says.
"It is not a good thing for the future of polar bears that we see this hybridization occurring," bear expert Chris Servheen told Vice News. "And it's not going to result in some kind of new bear that is successfully living in the Arctic."