Spring is here, and along with the fair weather and blooming flowers come varied behavioral displays of courtship and breeding for many animal species. In the Arctic, you'd distinguish spring primarily by the increased day length, because it is still cold in the far north, and polar bears are roaming all over the sea ice in search of food and, for some, mates.

It is polar bear breeding season in zoos as well. Every year, typically beginning in February and ending late in May, we see behavioral changes in our adult female and male bears. Changes in appetite and an increased focus on bears of the opposite sex are the hallmark of breeding season in zoos around the world.

As we strive to more thoroughly understand the behavior and ecology of the polar bear, we have begun a new research project that is designed to understand how polar bears find appropriate mates over great distances.

Through support of Polar Bears International and in collaboration with polar bear biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska, we are presenting scents from adult males and females to zoo bears throughout North America. The basic hypothesis is that if a male bear uses scent to find an available female, then he should spend more time investigating her scent than that of either another male bear or a female that has cubs (and so is not able to breed). The ability to discriminate between different classes of polar bear scent makes sense for this species, as it does for many other wide-ranging, solitary mammals such as giant pandas. Why waste the energy to travel 300 miles (over 480 kilometers) to court a female that cannot breed? The ability to gather detailed information relating to individual identity greatly increases the efficiency of the courtship process.

One of our main conservation goals at the San Diego Zoo is to contribute as much as we possibly can to the conservation of free-ranging animals. By designing research studies with our animals here at the Zoo that address questions of the basic biology of threatened animals in the wild, we contribute to the knowledge base that allows wildlife managers to make informed decisions about how best to manage wild populations of bears.

Global climate change effectively fragments polar bear habitat in some areas. By discerning the importance of scent trails to the social lives of polar bears, we can begin to estimate how this habitat fragmentation might impact polar bear breeding success, and as follows, the production of new cubs each year.

Megan Owen is a conservation program specialist in the San Diego Zoo's Applied Animal Ecology Division.

View the Zoo's polar bears daily on Polar Cam…

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