From a aloofness , it looks like a herd of sheep grazing on the side of a Benny Hill . But get a picayune close , and you ’ll realise that those white back breaker are more ursine than ovine , ashundreds of polar bearsdescended on a whale carcass on the remote Wrangel Island .
The incredible fit waswitnessed by a group of lucky touristson an jaunt through Arctic waters . They had stopped off at Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve , off the northern Siberian coast . The jaunt spot the beached carcass of a bowhead whale swarm with polar bears , as they jostled to get a taste of the rotting blubber and nitty-gritty . scientist have been alerted to the astounding billet , and are now monitor the gathering .
“ We were cruise down the coast and construe a ' herd ' or ' convention ' of Polar Bears on / near the beach , ” compose jaunt leader Rodney Russ , in ablog post . “ There was a dead bowhead whale and we count over 150 Polar Bears … that were either feed or had been prey on it in the immediate vicinity of the giant . ”
Apost by the federal governing of Wrangel Islandput the estimate number of bears higher still , intimate that there were actually around 230 . The government noted that there was a variety of ages and sexes present , with big males feeding alongside mothers and their young . At least two females had four cubs each .
Adult male bear and females with sonny are n’t commonly easy fellow traveller , as the former tend to have a wont of kill the little single . But it is evenhandedly well documented that when such a large food source short becomes available , especially so late in the yr , the bear will put their departure away and divvy up . What is unprecedented in this event is the sheer scale of measurement of the gathering .
It ’s believe that thebears seen on this single whalecarcass account for an incredible 1 percent of the entire planetary polar bear universe . While the animals are listed as “ threatened ” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ( IUCN ) , with the Arctic sea icemelting way earlierand ice shrinking in general , the bears ' hereafter do n’t look great .
There ’s a very persistent myth that icy bear numbers are booming , but it’sbased on undocumented data from the sixties . Even now , our best estimate for many populations of bears are simply our best guesses . Whether or not hunting ban helped bear numbers increase in some parts of the Arctic seems irrelevant when their habitat is literally disappearing here and now .
