Brown Polar Bears, Beluga-Narwhals and Other Hybrids Brought to You by Climate Change

Scientists and science writers have created catchy monikers for hybrid species, much the way tabloid writers merge the names of celebrity couples (Kimye, Brangelina, anyone?). Lions and tigers make ligers. Narwhals meet beluga whales in the form of narlugas. And pizzlies and grolar bears are a cross between polar bears and grizzlies. In coming years, their creativity may get maxed out to meet an expected spike in the number of hybrids. A driving force? Climate change.

A new study published in the journal PLOS Genetics showed that there’s a historic precedent for cross-breeding among polar bears and brown bears–we’ll jump on the bandwagon and call them brolar bears. The researchers also asserted that such hybridization is currently occurring at an accelerated clip. As sea ice melts, polar bears are forced ashore to an Arctic habitat that’s increasingly hospitable to brown bears. There have been recent sightings in Canada of the resulting mixed-breed animals, which have coloring anomalies such as muddy-looking snouts and dark stripes down their backs, along with the big heads and humped backs typical of brown bears.

As it turns out, climate-change-induced hybridization extends well beyond bears. A 2010 study published in the journal Nature listed 34 possible and actual climate-change-induced hybridizations (PDF) of Arctic and near-Arctic marine mammals–a group that has maintained a relatively consistent number of chromosomes over time, making them particularly primed for hybridization. Here are some highlights from this list, along with some more recent discoveries.

In 2009, a bowhead-right-whale hybrid was spotted in the Bering Sea by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Mammal Laboratory. Right whales, which typically hail from the North Pacific and North Atlantic, will increasingly be migrating north into the Arctic Ocean, the domain of bowheads, as a result of climate change–and co-mingling their DNA. The authors of the Nature study determined that “iminishing ice will encourage species overlap.”

The narluga has a very big head, according to the scientists who found one in West Greenland. Its snout and lower jaw were particularly burly, and its teeth shared some similarities with both narwhals and belugas. Both species, which form a whale family called monodontidae, live in the Arctic Ocean and hunters have reported seeing more whales of similar stature in the region.

Harbor and Dall’s porpoises have already been mixing it up off the coast of British Columbia, and given that harbor porpoises are likely to keep moving north from the temperate seas of the North Atlantic and North Pacific into the home waters of the Dall’s, the trend is expected to continue. (Click here to see rare photos of the hybrid porpoise.)

Scientists in Ontario, Canada, are investigating inter-breeding between southern and northern flying squirrels as the southern rodents push into northern habitats. The hybrid squirrels have the stature of the southern species and the belly coloring of the northern one.

Hybrid species often suffer from infertility, but some of these cross-breeds are having success at procreating. For example, researchers recently discovered the offspring of a female pizzly and a male grizzly bear (a subspecies of the brown bear) in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Despite cases like these, scientists are debating whether all of this hybridization is healthy. “Is this going to be a problem for the long-term existence of parental species? Are they going to merge into one big hybrid population?” asked University of California, Berkeley evolutionary biologist Jim Patton in an interview.

In the case of inter-bred polar bears, the concern is that the changing climate will be more welcoming to brown bears, and that while inter-species mating at first might appear to be an adaptive technique for polar bears, it could end up spelling their demise in all ways except cellular structure–much the way Neanderthals were folded into the human gene pool thanks to early humans in Europe more than 47,000 years ago.

Rare and endangered species are particularly vulnerable to the pitfalls of hybridization, according to the authors of the Nature study. “As more isolated populations and species come into contact, they will mate, hybrids will form and rare species are likely to go extinct,” they wrote. “As the genomes of species become mixed, adaptive gene combinations will be lost.”

Such is likely the case with the narluga. Scientists determined the animal’s lack of a tusk is a liability because the tusk is a measure of the narwhal’s breeding prowess. And a pizzly living at a German zoo showed seal-hunting tendencies, but lacked the swimming prowess of polar bears.

As Patton pointed out, it will be many years until we know the full consequences of hybridization. “We’re only going to find out in hindsight,” he said. But that’s not a reason to be complacent, according to the Nature authors, who called for the monitoring of at-risk species. “The rapid disappearance of sea ice,” they wrote, “leaves little time to lose.”

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