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  • 2021-04-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Are 'Pizzly Bears,' a Polar-Grizzly Mix, Real? (en)
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  • In April 2021, a photograph supposedly showing a pizzly bear, a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear, was circulated on social media: The animal pictured here is truly the offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly bear. While the term pizzly bear is often used to describe this hybrid animal, it's not an official name. These crossbreeds are also unofficially referred to as grolar bears. The discovery of the pizzly bear did not happen in 2021. The first wild pizzly bear was identified in 2006 after a bear with white fur, like a polar bear, and a humped back, like a grizzly bear, was killed by a group of hunters in Iqaluit, Canada. When researchers conducted a DNA test on the bear, they found that it was indeed a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear. The Associated Press reported at the time: Interest was renewed in the pizzly bear in April 2021 after the Independent published a Q&A with Larissa DeSantis, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, about how the climate crisis could lead to an increase in pizzly bears. DeSantis, who recently published a paper examining the changing diets of polar bears due to a warming Arctic region, said that we could see more pizzly bears as the habitats of polar bears and grizzly bears start to overlap. DeSantis said: The Washington Post elaborated on this topic in a 2016 article entitled Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating, writing: While climate change is truly causing more overlap between the habitats of brown bears and polar bears, this isn't the only way that polar bears and grizzly bears come in close proximity to one another. At the Osnabrück Zoo in Germany, for example, polar and grizzly bears were kept in the same enclosure for decades, and in 2004 two grolar bears (Tips and Taps) were born. The above-displayed social media post shows one of these captive-born pizzly bears (Taps), who, as far as we can tell, is still living at this German zoo. Unfortunately, Taps' sister, Tips, was shot and killed in 2017 after she escaped her enclosure. Tips photo is included at the top of this article. The German outlet DW reported: (en)
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