Polar Bear Sounds Download

Polar bears nap just about anywhere, any time, and especially after feeding on a seal! Napping helps them conserve energy, since their entire existence centers around hunting, eating, and conserving energy.

In summer, polar bears curl up on the sea ice, sometimes using a block of ice or a paw as a pillow. Landlocked bears sleep on the tundra or dig sleeping pits in the sand or gravel ridges along the shore.

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After feeding, polar bears head for open water and spend up to 15 minutes washing off, licking their paws, chests, and muzzles. They then dry themselves by shaking off excess water and rubbing their fur in the snow.

Pardon the pun, but a polar bear is quite the cool creature. But outside of the fact that global warming is most definitely affecting the sea ice territories of these massive and enigmatic carnivores, how much do most of us really know about these animals and the intricacies of how they operate in the natural world?

If lucky, we can sometimes catch the polar bears feeding. Their diet consists primarily of sea mammals, ringed seals being a favorite. They also go for bearded seals and occasionally walrus, beluga whales and narwhal. Needing to get as many calories into their system as possible, they can also supplement their diet with coastline carrion, including crabs, fish and marooned whales, as well as geese, bird eggs and small mammals.

Who knows how much longer we will be able to observe these creatures in their current habitat. If you have any interest in hanging out with polar bears in their natural environment, consider booking an expedition to the Arctic to spend time with these beautiful animals sooner rather than later.

Noise is a potential problem and it has been in their environment for decades now. The combination of noise disturbance on top of the implications of climate change for polar bears are the problem. Noise in and of itself is not a problem for polar bears, but if you layer it on top of the impacts of climate change, then you have the potential for a real problem.

Polar bears are large animals that, similar to their brown bear relatives, require energy dense foods in the form of fat and protein, to maintain body size and population densities (Hilderbrand et al., 1999; Felicetti et al., 2003). They got that way be eating seals, not berries. (Robbins et al., 2007).

Recent concern about the effects of anthropogenic noise on the well-being of marine mammals (National Research Council, 1994; National Research Council, 2000; National Research Council,2003; National Research Council, 2005) has prompted a great deal of work on the hearing of aquatic and semi-aquatic mammalian species(Au et al., 2000; Wartzok and Ketten, 1999; Richardson et al., 1995; Tyack et al., 2006; Nachtigall et al., 2005). The polar bear Ursus maritimus is the only bear species classified as a marine mammal (Rice, 1998),but there has been no audiometric examination of their hearing. According to the most comprehensive review of animal hearing studies(Fay, 1988), and a search of the literature published since, in fact no measurements have been completed on the hearing of any bear.

Four types of vocalizations made by ringed seals can be heard at all times of day in the Arctic spring: (1) low-pitched barks, (2) high pitched yelps,(3) low and high pitched growls and (4) short descending chirps(Stirling, 1973). Sonograms of the recorded sounds indicated that most of the energy was relatively low frequency below 2 kHz, with some harmonics up to 8 kHz.

The behavioral responses of polar bears to the calls of ringed seals recorded under water and then presented to the bears in air were measured(Cushing et al., 1988), and elicited similar responses from two recently captured bears. The bears erected their ears, lifted their heads, visually scanned the room and then began sniffing. As the ringed seal calls continued to be played the bears became active, paced their cage, groaned and chuffed, then pawed and chewed at their cage bars. All of these behaviors were observed only rarely in the baseline behavioral examinations prior to the presentation of ringed seal sounds,indicating that the bears responded to their primary prey's underwater vocalizations, presented in air, in a manner that indicated some importance of in-air hearing in detecting and locating their under-ice prey. Cushing's observations suggest that if polar bears could hear the underwater vocalizations of the ringed seals they might use seal vocalizations as a method to locate their favorite prey. It has also been noted(Stirling and Thomas, 2003)that the distinct trills of bearded seals might also provide a prominent cue for polar bear localization of these animals. A measurement of bear hearing would assist in the quantification of this sensory system during foraging behavior.

The hearing of large marine mammals has typically been measured with trained captive animals using psychophysical techniques(Nachtigall et al., 2000). Polar bears are large and aggressive, even in controlled environments, so traditional behavioral audiometry is difficult to perform. Therefore,obtaining data on the hearing capabilities of polar bears presents a challenge. There have been a number of recent measurements of large mammal hearing using auditory evoked potential (AEP) audiometry(Supin et al., 2001; Yuen et al., 2005; Nachtigall et al., 2005) and this technique is used in the present study to determine the hearing sensitivity of polar bears. This AEP procedure can be used successfully, even when animals are anesthetized, so when three polar bears had to be anesthetized for veterinary examination in Kolmarden Djurpark (Sweden),we used the opportunity to examine their ability to hear in air.

The subjects were three polar bears Ursus maritimus, two females(Mirsha, 26 years old, 270 kg body mass; Ilka, 12 years old, 290 kg body mass)and one male (Nordman, 12 years old, 420 kg body mass), housed in Kolmarden Zoo, Sweden.

As indicated earlier, we did not have the opportunity to measure the bear hearing in a sound-proof booth. All the measurements were done in a background of ambient noise. So the question arose as to whether the obtained thresholds were real absolute hearing thresholds or thresholds masked by ambient noise. To answer the question, the obtained thresholds had to be compared to the background noise level.

(A) Individual audiograms for the three polar bears in the ambient noise conditions. (B) The inter-individual averaged audiogram (mean), its correction for a 300 ms temporal summation (corr 300 ms), and limits of ambient noise fluctuations corresponding to overall noise levels of 62 and 72 dB (noise 62 and noise 72).

It is important to note that the bear thresholds are also rather low within a rather wide frequency range, up to the highest tested frequency of 22.5 kHz where the threshold is below 30 dB. So the frequency range of the polar bear's hearing is wider than this frequency, i.e. wider than in humans, which is less than 20 kHz (for a review, see Yost,1994). Thus we can state that polar bears possess an acute and wide-frequency-range hearing ability. Given the relatively low frequencies of the measured vocalizations produced by seals(Stirling, 1973) and heard by the bears in air (Cushing et al.,1988), we had no a priori reason based on foraging and the calls of their prey to expect that the bears would hear such a wide range of frequencies, but they did. Perhaps there is simply an overall advantage in the use of high frequencies for auditory localization. An awareness of the polar bear's acute and relatively wide-frequency hearing should cause people to operate with caution where there may be an impact of anthropogenic noise on polar bears. Certainly these results call for additional research on the high frequency hearing of all bears.

Two questions come to mind when evaluating these evoked potential data as true hearing data: (1) are evoked potential thresholds the same as those obtained when an animal is perceiving the sounds and reporting them, and (2)are measurements obtained from a bear anesthetized with Zalopine and Zoletil a true indication of its hearing abilities? The definition of hearing usually requires some sort of perception on the part of an animal or human, and thus in the strictest sense auditory-evoked potential studies do not directly measure hearing(Stevens, 1970). Recent work,however, directly measuring hearing on whales and dolphins and comparing traditional behavioral and AEP procedures, has shown that the methods produce directly comparable results (Yuen et al.,2005; Houser and Finneran, 2006). If these findings can also be applied to the polar bear, then it seems reasonable to assume that the AEP measures have at least given a clear first measure of polar bear hearing. The data indicate that polar bears hear very well, particularly in the range between 11.2 and 22.5 kHz. If Zalopine and Zoletil disrupted the ability to measure auditory evoked potentials, these sorts of data would not have been obtained.

The study was supported by the US Office of Naval Research, the Russian Ministry of Science and Education, and the Kolmarden Zoo Department of Research and Education. Bears were available because of the generosity of the Kolmarden Zoo and staff. This is contribution number 1262 of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and work was approved by the University of Hawaii Animal Care and Utilization Committee Protocol number 05-049. Thank you for the work of two very sharp and fast reviewers and to Ian Stirling for graciously sharing his knowledge and papers on polar bears.

Sleepy Polar Bear is a project by Battl Victory Records and Battl Victory Foundation that aims to provide babies with a comfortable and peaceful sleep through relaxing sounds mixed with white noise music. The project has been developed after conducting extensive research with doctors and midwives to create the perfect blend of sounds that can help babies drift off to sleep faster and stay asleep longer. e24fc04721