Polar Bears Are Known to Bludgeon Walruses to Death With Stone and Ice

A piece of ice is the perfect weapon for murder, according to an old saying.

Walruses, reaching as much as 1,300 kilograms in weight with large tusks and very thick skulls, are nearly impossible for a polar bear to devour. But new research proposes that some polar bears have adopted an act of bashing walruses on the head using a block of ice or stone.

Polar Bear

For over 200 years, Inuit in Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic have told tales of polar bears - Ursus maritimus - making use of these tools to assist them in killing walruses. Still, naturalists, explorers, and writers usually discharge such cases, relegating them to fake tales along with stories concerning shape-shifting bears.

These reports' persistence, including one report from an Inuk hunter in the late 1990s, together with pictures of GoGo - a male polar bear at a Japanese zoo - making use of tools to get suspended meat made Ian Stirling and team to carry out further investigation.

One of the leading polar bear biologists in the world, Stirling said: "It's been my general observation that if an experienced Inuit hunter tells you that he's seen something, it's worth listening to and very likely to be correct."

The Weapon

The researchers assessed historical, secondhand study of tool use in polar bears which Inuit hunters reported to naturalists and explorers together with recent observations by non-Inuit researchers and Inuit hunters and the recorded observations of GoGo and polar bears' closest relatives (brown bears) with the use of tools in captivity to get food.

This review proposes that the use of tool in wild polar bears, which is somewhat uncommon occurs when it comes to hunting walruses due to their large size, the researchers stated in the June Arctic.

Director of the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, Andrew Derocher, who didn't partake in the new study said: "Really, the only species you would want to bonk on the head with a piece of ice would be a walrus."

Act of Emulation

Derocher has a suspicion that it might only be a little number of polar bears that display this behavior. For instance, if a mother bear discovers how to make use of ice or stone in this way, it possibly becomes something her descendants would emulate, but not necessarily an act polar bears across the Arctic would take up, he says.

Among animals, making use of tools to deal with problems has been considered as a marker of a greater level of what humans regard as intelligence. For instance, notoriously clever chimpanzees, craft spears so as to capture smaller mammals (SN: 2/28/07).

Dolphins hold marine sponges inside their oral cavity to stir sand and discover prey (SN: 6/8/05). And it has been known that elephants drop logs or big rocks onto electric fences in order to disrupt the power supply.

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