* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Friday, May 30, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment

    HYBE Cashes In: Offloads Final Stake in K-Pop Rival SM Entertainment for $177 Million!

    Allied Gaming & Entertainment Receives Expected Nasdaq Notice Regarding Delayed Quarterly Report – Business Wire

    Allied Gaming & Entertainment Faces Nasdaq Notice Over Delayed Quarterly Report

    Weekly Entertainment Report May 29-June 1: Where to find lively arts, music, and shows – Manchester Ink Link

    Weekly Entertainment Report May 29-June 1: Where to find lively arts, music, and shows – Manchester Ink Link

    Aziz Ansari made Keanu Reeves Indian food so he wouldn’t feel ‘freaked out’ directing him in Good Fortune (exclusive) – Entertainment Weekly

    Aziz Ansari Whips Up Indian Cuisine for Keanu Reeves to Ease Directing Jitters in Good Fortune

    Cassie Ventura welcomes third child – crossroadstoday.com

    Cassie Ventura Joyfully Welcomes Her Third Child!

    Drew Brees opens Surge Entertainment Center in Metairie hot spot for new businesses – NOLA.com

    Drew Brees Unveils Exciting New Surge Entertainment Center in Metairie!

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    i3D Robotics Unveils Breakthrough Glass Defect Detection Technology – USGlass Magazine

    Revolutionary Glass Defect Detection Technology Unveiled by i3D Robotics!

    4Liberty Announces Collaboration with Itron to Drive Innovation in Utility Technology Adoption and Optimization – FinancialContent

    4Liberty Partners with Itron to Revolutionize Utility Technology and Boost Innovation

    Q1 2025 Quantum Technology Investment: What’s Driving the Surge in Quantum Investment? – The Quantum Insider

    Unleashing the Future: Exploring the Surge in Quantum Technology Investments for Q1 2025

    MIT Team Releases Tempting Report on Electric Aircraft Technology – AVweb

    MIT Team Releases Tempting Report on Electric Aircraft Technology – AVweb

    MSE, DXC Technology expand tech partnership – Sports Business Journal

    MSE, DXC Technology expand tech partnership – Sports Business Journal

    Technology Driving Performance: How Elite MA Plans Leverage Data, Care Coordination, and Advanced Analytics to Thrive Amid CMS’s Rigorous 2025 Standards, Black Book – Newswire.com

    Unlocking Success: How Top MA Plans Harness Data and Analytics to Excel Under CMS’s 2025 Standards

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment

    HYBE Cashes In: Offloads Final Stake in K-Pop Rival SM Entertainment for $177 Million!

    Allied Gaming & Entertainment Receives Expected Nasdaq Notice Regarding Delayed Quarterly Report – Business Wire

    Allied Gaming & Entertainment Faces Nasdaq Notice Over Delayed Quarterly Report

    Weekly Entertainment Report May 29-June 1: Where to find lively arts, music, and shows – Manchester Ink Link

    Weekly Entertainment Report May 29-June 1: Where to find lively arts, music, and shows – Manchester Ink Link

    Aziz Ansari made Keanu Reeves Indian food so he wouldn’t feel ‘freaked out’ directing him in Good Fortune (exclusive) – Entertainment Weekly

    Aziz Ansari Whips Up Indian Cuisine for Keanu Reeves to Ease Directing Jitters in Good Fortune

    Cassie Ventura welcomes third child – crossroadstoday.com

    Cassie Ventura Joyfully Welcomes Her Third Child!

    Drew Brees opens Surge Entertainment Center in Metairie hot spot for new businesses – NOLA.com

    Drew Brees Unveils Exciting New Surge Entertainment Center in Metairie!

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    i3D Robotics Unveils Breakthrough Glass Defect Detection Technology – USGlass Magazine

    Revolutionary Glass Defect Detection Technology Unveiled by i3D Robotics!

    4Liberty Announces Collaboration with Itron to Drive Innovation in Utility Technology Adoption and Optimization – FinancialContent

    4Liberty Partners with Itron to Revolutionize Utility Technology and Boost Innovation

    Q1 2025 Quantum Technology Investment: What’s Driving the Surge in Quantum Investment? – The Quantum Insider

    Unleashing the Future: Exploring the Surge in Quantum Technology Investments for Q1 2025

    MIT Team Releases Tempting Report on Electric Aircraft Technology – AVweb

    MIT Team Releases Tempting Report on Electric Aircraft Technology – AVweb

    MSE, DXC Technology expand tech partnership – Sports Business Journal

    MSE, DXC Technology expand tech partnership – Sports Business Journal

    Technology Driving Performance: How Elite MA Plans Leverage Data, Care Coordination, and Advanced Analytics to Thrive Amid CMS’s Rigorous 2025 Standards, Black Book – Newswire.com

    Unlocking Success: How Top MA Plans Harness Data and Analytics to Excel Under CMS’s 2025 Standards

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home General

Pizzlies, grolars and narlugas: Why we may soon see more Arctic hybrids

July 27, 2024
in General
Pizzlies, grolars and narlugas: Why we may soon see more Arctic hybrids
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

In 2006, a hunter in Canada’s Northwest Territories shot a bear that had white fur with brown patches, long claws, and a grizzly-like hump. The strange-looking bear turned out to be a hybrid: a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear.

Over the following years, scientists identified a total of eight polar-grizzly hybrids, and found all the animals  were descendants of the same female polar bear. Sometimes called “grolars” when the father is a grizzly bear or a “pizzlies” when the father is a polar bear, these bears made headlines, and some researchers warned that the Arctic could become prime territory for hybrids due to climate change.

A black and white image of two small bears on their hind legs in a cage facing each other photographed from a profile view.

Hybrid bear cubs (two shown) were born to a Kodiak bear mother and a polar bear father at the National Zoo in 1937.

Photograph By J. Baylor Roberts, Nat Geo Image Collection

“We’re interested in assessing the hybridization rate because we know that as the climate is warming in the Arctic, grizzly bears and polar bears are coming more and more into contact with one another,” says Ruth Rivkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manitoba. Using genetic tools, Rivkin and her colleagues recently found that hybridization remains rare among polar bears—for now.

Bears aren’t the only Arctic species that have intermingled, and many of these hybrids are virtually indistinguishable by sight. That’s why genetic analyses have become incredibly important. Scientists are looking deep into animals’ DNA to identify and learn more about potential hybrids, often raising more questions than answers. 

Unmasking hybrids 

Typically, animals don’t mate outside their species, due to a variety of barriers, including geography. But hybrids can arise when species or subspecies that would not normally overlap run into each other when searching for a mate. (Read more about how hybrids happen.) 

Beluga whales and narwhals split on the evolutionary tree around five million years ago, but sometimes the species cross paths in western Greenland’s Disko Bay. In the 1980s, a hunter collected an unusual skull that researchers later hypothesized belonged to a beluga-narwhal hybrid. 

“This was the early days of genetics, and getting DNA from a skull that had been sitting for three to five years outside just wasn’t really an option in the early part of the ‘90s,” says Mikkel Skovrind, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who helped evaluate the skull with modern genetic techniques in 2019. The study confirmed the identity of the “narluga” hybrid and pegged its birth to the 1970s or earlier.

A Large bear with dark fur and smaller bears in tall grass.

As temperatures warm, grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis, female shown with a cub) may move further north, bringing them closer to polar bear territory.

Photograph By John Eastcott and Yva Momatiuk, Nat Geo Image collection

A large bear with white fur stands with two small bears with white fur on ice.

Similarly, melting sea ice in the Arctic could drive polar bears (Ursus maritimus, female shown with cubs) further south in search of food.

Photograph By Florian Schulz, Nat Geo Image Collection

A white whale with a bulbus head is photographed very closely with the same species swimming behind it bubbles rise upward around their bodies in the water.

Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) overlap during mating season with narwhals at Disko Bay in western Greenland.

Photograph By Brian Skerry, Nat Geo Image Collection

A close view of a narwhal with a long oval body and a single long straight tusk.

The narluga whale hybrid from Disko Bay, a male, lacked the iconic tusk for which male narwhals (Monodon monoceros, shown) are known.

Photograph By Paul Nicklen, Nat Geo Image Collection

Climate connections

While some Arctic hybrids arise from chance encounters, warming temperatures and melting sea ice could remove a substantial barrier to species coming into contact with each other. Sea ice losses could drive polar bears to new locations in search of food, and climate change could also shift grizzly habitats north, resulting in the species sharing more space during mating season. 

To see if new hybrids were popping up, Rivkin and her colleagues examined DNA samples collected from bears in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland from 1975 to 2015, looking for genes from polar, grizzly, and hybrid bears. Out of the more than 800 samples they examined, researchers only found the eight hybrids they already knew about.

“I was surprised,” says Rivkin. “It would be really hard to visually distinguish hybrids from grizzly bears or polar bears, and so I had sort of expected to see these hidden hybrids showing up genetically. But based on our findings, we think that hybridization is pretty rare.”

Still, the existing hybrid bears are likely the result of warming temperatures, which will remain a problem in the future. “We need to continue monitoring these bears to make sure that if there is hybridization happening we can adjust our conservation and management strategies accordingly,” says Rivkin.

Evidence has linked climate to other Arctic hybridizations. Researchers recently traced the history of a hybrid population of Atlantic puffins on an island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Their results showed that two subspecies had hybridized sometime since 1910, as a larger-bodied subspecies shifted its range south. The authors wrote, “the emergence of this hybrid population coincides precisely with the anthropogenic warming of the Arctic.” 

Going back even further, some researchers suspect that polar bears and brown bears actually split 600,000 years ago and continued to intermix when ancient climate shifts overlapped their territories. Estimates for the species’ split range from 70,000 to 5 million years ago, but some modern populations of Alaskan brown bears may have even retained polar bear genes.

An Atlantic puffin returns to its nesting cliff at Latrabjarg, Westfjords, in Iceland. Other birds perch on the cliffside.

Atlantic puffins live on the fringes of the Arctic (one shown in Iceland). Two subspecies hybridized sometime since 1910, after the larger of the two subspecies shifted south. The hybrid birds now populate Bjørnøya, the southernmost island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

Photograph By Thomas Peschak, Nat Geo Image Collection

Is hybridization a good thing?

Swapping genes with another species or subspecies has pros and cons, and the negative effects of hybridization are particularly concerning for species at risk of extinction.

Rather than becoming “super animals” inheriting all the best traits from each parent species, hybrid animals can be at a disadvantage. While early generations of hybrid species might have “hybrid vigor” and produce fitter offspring, later generations may suffer from “outbreeding depression” resulting in lower fitness and reproductive rates. Conservationists also worry that legal conservation frameworks may not apply to hybrid animals.

Endangered blue whales do not technically live in the Arctic Ocean but are found in the North Atlantic above the Arctic Circle. A recent study found that around 3.5 percent of the North Atlantic population’s genetic blueprint derives from fin whales. 

“That 3.5 percentage is a lot,” says Mark Engstrom, who is curator emeritus at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and an author on the study. “It represents significant input of fin whale into blue whale populations.”

One concern is “genetic swamping”, when the genes of one species are overwhelmed by the genes of another species. This onslaught has raised the extinction risk for Scotland’s European wildcats. Engstrom says the current evidence does not show whether or not the level of hybridization in blue whales negatively impacts the species.

For vulnerable Atlantic puffins, the impact is also yet to be determined. “This is the million dollar question, in a way, at least for the puffins: Is this beneficial, or is this detrimental? Generally speaking, hybridization can result in… either one,” says Oliver Kersten, a researcher at the University of Oslo who worked on the puffin study. 

Though genetic studies are providing some answers to hybrid mysteries, researchers still have questions: Will some hybrid species in the Arctic end up with a traits poorly suited to their habitat? Will some have low reproductive rates or be infertile? Researchers also want to know how many hybrids are out there, and how climate change might impact these species.

Engstrom points to his whale research, saying, “None of these studies are an endpoint…  They often raise many more questions than they answer.”

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : National Geographic – https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/arctic-hybrid-polar-grizzly-bear-genetics-climate

Previous Post

Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth—never before seen in reptiles

Next Post

5 reasons why flying is becoming more dangerous

In Praise of the Inherent Queerness of Nature – Literary Hub

Celebrating Nature’s Beautifully Queer Essence

May 30, 2025
China has developed the largest drone carrier in the world — and it’s getting ready for takeoff – Live Science

China Unveils the World’s Largest Drone Carrier: Soaring into a New Era of Aerial Innovation!

May 30, 2025
Bird feeders have caused a dramatic evolution of California hummingbirds – Science | AAAS

How Bird Feeders Are Transforming California’s Hummingbird Population

May 30, 2025
Kelly Ripa opens up about empty nest lifestyle: ‘Total freak show all the time’ – HOLA

Kelly Ripa opens up about empty nest lifestyle: ‘Total freak show all the time’ – HOLA

May 30, 2025
New COVID variant driving up cases in parts of the world, WHO says – PBS

New COVID variant driving up cases in parts of the world, WHO says – PBS

May 30, 2025
Citi CEO bullish on US economy and entrepreneurship under Trump leadership – Fox Business

Citi CEO Optimistic About US Economy and Entrepreneurial Growth Under Trump Leadership

May 30, 2025

HYBE Cashes In: Offloads Final Stake in K-Pop Rival SM Entertainment for $177 Million!

May 30, 2025
Expanding mental health services in Virginia through virtual care – Chief Healthcare Executive

Transforming Mental Health Care in Virginia: The Rise of Virtual Services

May 30, 2025
Dynasty city: How three Miami families may extend their decades of political power – Miami Herald

Miami’s Political Legacy: The Rise of Three Families and Their Quest for Lasting Influence

May 30, 2025
i3D Robotics Unveils Breakthrough Glass Defect Detection Technology – USGlass Magazine

Revolutionary Glass Defect Detection Technology Unveiled by i3D Robotics!

May 30, 2025

Categories

Archives

May 2025
MTWTFSS
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 
« Apr    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (652)
  • Economy (665)
  • Entertainment (21,572)
  • General (15,248)
  • Health (9,707)
  • Lifestyle (667)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (667)
  • Politics (673)
  • Science (15,887)
  • Sports (21,170)
  • Technology (15,652)
  • World (653)

Recent News

In Praise of the Inherent Queerness of Nature – Literary Hub

Celebrating Nature’s Beautifully Queer Essence

May 30, 2025
China has developed the largest drone carrier in the world — and it’s getting ready for takeoff – Live Science

China Unveils the World’s Largest Drone Carrier: Soaring into a New Era of Aerial Innovation!

May 30, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version