Beth Shapiro

We'll get there.

I mean, someday we'll we'll figure it out.

And that's going to open up a lot of really cool.

Yeah, they have, their hair is long and it's clear.

That's why polar bears, have you seen those pictures of bears in zoos where they look, polar bears in zoos where they look green?

It grows in the, the hair is hollow.

And so if they're too wet and not cold enough, they can turn, it's this like weird.

Inside their hair.

We did some work in my academic lab where we discovered that polar bears and brown bears hybridize with each other.

This is one of those funny stories about academia with a scarcity mindset there where we submit a grant proposal and we say, hey, we have this.

really cool observation that polar bears and brown bears hybridized during the last ice age when they overlap with each other.

And it gets rejected because they're like, that's dumb.

We know that doesn't happen.

And then we found another hybrid polar bear from the previous interglacial.

And then there's evidence that they're hybridizing today.

Yeah, they find them today.

So whenever they overlap geographically, they breed.

But what's interesting about this is that we always find the hybrids living like brown bears, even though it's probably that the mom is a polar bear.

Because a brown bear boy will wake up from hibernation and go out onto polar bear territory to scavenge for food.

And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator, whereas brown bear females are seasonal.