The Great Pizzly Bear!

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Clisset, Christine. (2010) Pizzly Bears-When polar bears and grizzlies breed, they can produce fertile offspring. Why can't other species? Slate

Available online at:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/05/pizzly_bears.html

Höflinger, Laura (2012) In the Land of the Pizzly: As Arctic Melts, Polar and Grizzly Bears Mate Spiegel Online

Available online at:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/polar-bears-and-grizzlies-producing-hybrid-offspring-as-arctic-melts-a-859218.html

 

Struzik, Ed. (2012) Unusual Number of Grizzly and Polar Bears Spotted in High Arctic, e360 digest.

Available online at:

http://e360.yale.edu/digest/unusual_number_of_grizzly_and__hybrid_bears_spotted_in_high_arctic/3567/

Global Warming and the Great Pizzly Bear!

            It seems that now, and for the last few years, one of the biggest issues in science is global warming.  Global warming affects multiple facets of biology including animal diet, behavior, and physiological processes. Global warming has been pushing animals to adapt in many ways.

            A new phenomenon being observed in the Arctic/ Northwest Territories are Pizzly or Grolar Bears.

                                                                                                                                        Corbis

A bear believed to be a "pizzly," a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly bear.

Normally, Grizzly Bears and Polar Bears rarely cross paths, and if/when they do, it is not during mating season. Polar Bears typically spend their mating season on sea ice, mating between April and May (wikipedia), where Grizzly bears mate between May and early July, a little bit further south (and they don’t go on the sea ice!).

20 years ago, Grizzly bears would not dare venture to the Far North to invade Polar bear habitat, because it was far too cold and unnecessary, but global warming has increased temperatures noticeably for these bears (Struzik, 2012). It has also decreased the amount of sea ice, and how long the sea ice is available to polar bears to hunt and mate, forcing them further south to find and gather food. This has caused Polar bears and Grizzly bears to cross paths during mating season, and allowed them to interbreed.

Because Polar Bears and Grizzly bears have fairly common ancestry (Clisset, 2010), Pizzly bears, or Grolar Bears, are sexually viable – but they do not necessarily have hybrid vigor. They tend to hunt seals the same way polar bears do, but their longer claws are not very good for walking on the ice. The offspring tend to be less fit than their parents, because they do not have the same specializations to the environment that the parents display. At this point, there seems to be very little chance that the pizzly bears will outcompete their parents, because only a very small percentage of Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears actually share habitat – solely the Polar Bears venturing far south and the Grizzly Bears venturing far north (Struzik, 2012)

Hybrids are not a protected species, because they are not considered polar bears, but they are especially "prized" possessions for hunters, due to their rarity (Höflinger, 2012). This raises the same argument that we discussed in class. If hybrids are carrying polar bear genes, then why are they not protected as well?

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422

Another week to save the owls!

BRAKES, C. R. and SMITH, R. H. (2005), Exposure of non-target small mammals to rodenticides: short-term effects, recovery and implications for secondary poisoning. Journal of Applied Ecology, 42: 118–128. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2005.00997.x

Available online at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2005.00997.x/full

Accessed February 6, 2013

Albert, C.A., Wilson, L.K., Mineau, P., Trudeau, S., Elliott, J.E. (2009),Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Three Owl Species from Western Canada, 1988–2003. Arch Environ Contam Toxicol,DOI 10.1007/s00244-009-9402-z

Available online at:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsccp.ca%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fspecies-habitat%2Fdocuments%2Fanti%2520coagulatn%2520rodenticides%2520in%2520three%2520owl%2520species-western%2520canada_a%2520albert%2520et%2520al%25202009.pdf&ei=_n4SUayxL4q8qAGk3oGIAg&usg=AFQjCNHZU3jCgdrVrQ0yyALgvM6jrqNBRQ&sig2=A86E-y7587glV06qQmaTqw&bvm=bv.41934586,d.aWM

Accessed: February 5, 2013

Get rid of those pesky rodents!?!?!

            It’s probably fairly common for people to hate unwanted rodents in their houses. It is a huge problem that faces rural communities, and a lot of people deal with this problem by buying rat poison, and leaving it in their houses to get discovered by their unwanted guests. The mice/rats find the poison, consume it, and then go outside to die. Problem solved, right? WRONG.

                                                Photo: Wild Wonders of Europe

            These mice go outside to die, and in their weakened state, they are very easy prey for hungry birds. The birds eat the mice, and then they get sick and/or die. A study by Albert et al., 2009, analyzed birds found in western Canada and the Yukon. They analyzed the livers of 164 dead owls looking to find different rodenticides present in their livers.

  

Table 1, above showed that of the 164 owls tested, 114 of them had rodenticide residue in their livers.

70% of all owls tested had at least one type of rodent poison in their bloodstream!

SAVE THE OWLS!

Owls aren’t the only small mammals affected by rodenticides either. A study by Brakes and Smith in 2005 showed the effect of 6 different rodenticides on other non-target mammals such as weasels, and stoats. Brakes and Smith found that there was about a 60% decrease in population of non-target mammals on farms that used rodenticides.

So what can we do?

There are several other methods devised to rid your house of mice without using harmful poisons.

1.     Live traps. People can buy live traps, in which the mouse enters, gets stuck, and later can be release outside.

2.     Sonic waves. Some companies have devised a machine that plugs into your walls emitting sound waves that mice do not like, and therefore they do not stay.

3.     Traditional mousetraps. There are hundreds of different types of mouse traps, all with the same purpose – to kill the mouse.

Although some methods are obviously more humane than others, all are effective. If people were planning on killing the mouse anyway with poison anyways, they might as well save the owls, and get rid of only the animal that they are targeting.

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