Dec. 18 (UPI) — A team of Canadian researchers have documented a rare case of a female polar bear adopting an unrelated cub who was apparently orphaned.
The nonprofit group Polar Bears International said researchers placed a tracking collar on a female polar bear with a single cub in the spring, and she was spotted again in the fall — this time with two cubs of approximately the same age.
The mother bear, identified as X33991, is part of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear sub-population. Researchers said that in over 4,600 bears from the sub-population that have been studied over the course of the last half century, this is only the 13th documented case of a mother adopting an orphaned cub.
“Polar bear adoptions are very rare and unusual and we don’t know why they happen,” Alysa McCall, director of conservation outreach and a staff scientist for Polar Bears International, said in a video released by the organization.
Evan Richardson, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said polar bears have strong maternal instincts.
“Female polar bears are really good moms and so they’re just primed for looking after and caring for their offspring,” he said. “We think if there’s a little cub that’s bawling on the coast and has lost its mother, these females just can’t help themselves but to take them on and look after them. It’s a really curious behavior and an interesting aspect of polar bear life history.”
Researchers said they took a genetic sample from the adopted cub in the hopes of identifying what happened to its biological mother.