We had lectures every night about polar bears, permafrost, climate variability, other bears, but one of the most interesting was Dr. Jane Waterman of the University of Manitoba. She is compiling the "whisker prints" of the Churchill polar bears into an identification library to be used and maintained by different scientist to study the individual polar bears. The whiskers of the polar bears act like finger prints for humans and can help identify individual bears. She think that there is only about 90 bears in the Churchill area that account for the sighting by tourists. This is the most studied group of polar bears in the world since it is also the easiest to get to. Dr. Waterman asked us to bring side view--left and right--of bears to a workshop the next day. Also front views and whole body views of the same bears. Most of the males have facial scars that are distinctive like this bear. Females only breed every 3 years so there is stiff competition for the males and there are lots of fights during mating season.
Some have ear tags, males are almost twice as big as females and any other unique characteristics were noted. We named the bears we saw on Day 1 in the tundra buggy with alphabetical names of candies, so the first days bears had names Aero, Bounty, Caramac, Dimebar, Eclipse, Fudge, Gummie, Humbug, Icebreaker, Jujube, Kitkat, and Lemon Drop. Day 2 we came up with a list of insect names but since we only saw one bear close enough to study, she was named Ant. Below is one of the polar bears that was entered into the data base. Anchor points are marked at his eye, bottom of the nose and end of his mouth. The computer will triangulate that whisker area and feed the information into an image pattern recognition software developed by one of Jane's grad students to identify the bear.
There is a website that is open to anyone who is interested or wants to contribute a polar bear photo--even bears in zoos are welcome! It's polarbearlibrary.org
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