{"id":457645,"date":"2025-12-19T11:30:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T11:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/457645\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:30:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T11:30:28","slug":"watch-wild-polar-bear-mother-adopts-orphaned-cub-in-rare-occurrence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/457645\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch: Wild polar bear mother adopts orphaned cub in ‘rare’ occurrence"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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<\/a> by the organization.\n<\/p>\n

Evan Richardson, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said polar bears have strong maternal instincts.\n<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Researchers said they took a genetic sample from the adopted cub in the hopes of identifying what happened to its biological mother.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dec. 18 (UPI) — A team of Canadian researchers have documented a rare case of a female polar…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":457646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3425,14764,14762,159,67,132,68,14763,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-457645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-funny","10":"tag-odd","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-weird","16":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}