Land Mammals, features and articles | Educational Science

May 8, 2014

How Polar Bears Survive on 'Heart Attack' Diet

If humans ate the same fatty foods as polar bears, they would have heart attacks. But a new study reveals how these magnificent Arctic beasts survive on such a specialized diet. It turns out the beasts have evolved genes that allow them to survive on a diet of mostly seals...

May 13, 2014

Canadian Polar Bear Hunt Continues, Despite Extinction Threat (Op-Ed)

Zak Smith is an attorney for the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC. This Op-Ed is adapted from one that first appeared on the NRDC blog Switchboard. Smith contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Most people don't know that Canada is the only country where...

Jun 6, 2014

Amazing Video Captures Polar Bear's Point of View

Polar bears nuzzle potential mates and play soccer with a frozen seal carcass in an amazing new video captured by collar cameras attached to the iconic animals. This rare peek at Arctic life is part of an ongoing research project led by the U.S. Geological Survey that aims to track...

Mar 31, 2015

Animal Sex: How Polar Bears Do It

As the largest land carnivores currently on the planet, polar bears are fearsome predators and the masters of their Artic domain. But do these hulking animals also have a softer side toward each other, or are their mating behaviors just as cold and unforgiving as their frozen habitat? Polar bears...

Apr 1, 2015

Hunting on Land Can't Help a Hungry Polar Bear

Even though some polar bears are hunting on land more often in areas hit by climate change, a diet of bird eggs and berries can't sustain these huge animals, a new study finds. Only a handful of polar bears have been spotted snacking on land-based foods to supplement their traditional,...

Jun 13, 2015

In Photos: Polar Bears Eat Dolphins Trapped in Ice

For the first time, scientists have reported polar bears preying on white-beaked dolphins in Svalbard. The sighting, described in the journal Polar Research, is important because shrinking polar bear habitat is expected to change where the animals can live, particularly in the area of Svalbard and the Barents Sea, the...

Jun 13, 2015

Polar Bears Now Eat Dolphins, Thanks to Global Warming

Faced with a rapidly changing habitat, polar bears are adapting with a new entrée: For the first time, a polar bear was seen preying on a white-beaked dolphin carcass that had been trapped in the ice in Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands in the Arctic Ocean. In April 2014,...

Jul 6, 2015

Only Climate Action Can Save Polar Bears

Margaret Williams, managing director of the Arctic program at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Living in Alaska, I have seen firsthand that the Arctic is rapidly changing. It's always been a land of extremes (weather, daylight, terrain), but now even...

Jul 28, 2015

Polar Bear Awes with Record-Breaking Dive

This story was updated at 2 p.m. ET. Polar bears are known to be excellent swimmers, but new research suggests that they are also superb divers. Scientists recently observed a polar bear dive that lasted 3 minutes, 10 seconds, shattering the previous known record by about 2 minutes. The researchers...

Aug 27, 2015

Why Knut the Polar Bear Died So Suddenly

He spawned millions of fuzzy toys, garnered media attention on everything from his cod-liver diet to his lack of mates and even inspired his own song before his untimely death in 2011. He was Knut the polar bear, the star of the Berlin Zoo. Now, new research shows how the...

Sep 15, 2015

Starving Polar Bear Photo: Don't Blame (Just) Climate Change

This article was updated on Sept. 21 at 10:12 a.m. ET. Polar bears have become the fuzzy face of the impacts of climate change, with shrinking sea ice in the Arctic affecting how the bears normally roam and hunt. Now, after a photograph of an emaciated polar bear hobbling on...

May 2, 2016

Hungry Polar Bears Decimating Seabird Colonies

While the iconic images of polar bears in a warming world are arguably of starving bears shivering on ice floes, or of bears swimming great distances as those floes disappear, a different scene may be a more accurate portrayal of the animal's near future: hungry polar bears decimating colonies of...

Sep 14, 2016

Russian Scientists Trapped By Polar Bears Have Been Rescued

Five meteorologists surrounded by polar bears at a research station on a remote island in high-Arctic Russia have been rescued, according to the Guardian. A Russian research vessel happened to be close by and has arrived on scene, supplying dogs and flares that have since scared the polar bears away...

Jan 10, 2017

Polar Bear Body Cam Shows Predator's POV

New footage from a polar bear body cam shows how these ursine inhabitants of the Arctic play, swim and hunt. Just released by the U.S. Geographic Survey, the footage is from a point-of-view camera around the neck of a female polar bear from the southern Beaufort Sea, just north of...

Feb 13, 2017

Scientist Dons Polar Bear Costume to Stalk Musk Oxen in the Arctic

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Our Earth has unimaginable diversity, from seascapes 8,000 meters below the ocean's surface to landscapes 8,000 meters above it. Its physical beauty comes in inconceivable living varieties. Some mammals...