Pizzly: A hybrid of a polar and brown bear. Every year there are more and more of them in the wild (7 photos)

Love is submissive not only to all ages, but also to all species. A good example of this is pizzly. What, you haven’t heard of such a beast? Don't worry, in the near future he may become a familiar inhabitant of the north.





If pizzlies could talk, I imagine their first question would be: Am I some kind of joke to you? Could you give it a better name? And in this I will completely agree: for such a brutal animal as a hybrid of a brown and a polar bear, this is an extremely ridiculous name! Fortunately, the animal has more sonorous names: grolar or polar grizzly.



The fur of such hybrids has been white since childhood. But in adulthood, it begins to acquire a bluish or yellowish tint.

As you understand, in the case of Pizzly, the joke about a white mom and a brown dad went too far. Both clubfoot are genetically similar to each other. By the standards of evolution, their species separated quite recently - some 400,000 years ago. So it’s difficult for them to get offspring from each other, but it’s possible.





When one took after his mother and the other took after his father.

At first, pizzlies appeared exclusively in zoos. The first cubs from a mixed marriage were recorded in the 19th century, at the Stuttgart Zoo. But now researchers are finding grolars in the wild. Such individuals are rare, but the very fact of their appearance is already an alarm bell. About what? About global warming.



You can sometimes tell a polar bear from a pizzly bear only by its face.



Although in some cases they look more like brown bears.

In a good way, the territories of polar and brown bears can overlap, but the animals cannot intersect with each other. The former often hang out on ice floes, the latter live in dense forests. But the stronger the climate change, the more often pizzlies will appear.



Given the current rate of climate change, scientists predict that polar bears could become extinct by 2100.

As the ice melts, polar bears increasingly have to visit their brothers from the mainland - they move hundreds of kilometers away from the water. Browns, on the contrary, are moving north due to deforestation. Thus, species that previously avoided each other began to see each other more often. Well, it’s not far from a cup of tea with a portion of cake...



Mikhail, we demand our alimony!

On the one hand, the appearance of hybrids is a clear marker of the existence of global problems. On the other hand, pizzlies give polar bears a chance to preserve their gene pool in the face of global warming. Unlike the polar toapy, the grolar is adapted to higher temperatures and can eat everything: from meat to roots. Maybe love can't save the world. But it is entirely within her power to save polar bears from complete extinction!