Most of us learn about nature from Disney movies, so the fact that even the most adorable animals will happily snack on human bones can seem shocking to us. But nature is cruel, animals have to eat what they can get, and thanks to climate change, polar bears are going to start eating us, and not just out of revenge for what we’ve done to their penises.
This news, discovered in a research paper by The Washington Post, is a pretty simple and logical chain of events. As the Arctic ice melts, polar bears lose their habitat and their ability to hunt their preferred prey, seals. Seals are most vulnerable when they’re sprawled out on the ice, so the less ice there is, the harder it is to catch and eat them. That will, inevitably, drive the bears closer and closer to land, where humans live. Polar bears may prefer a nice dinner of seal, but away from the ice, they’re never going to survive unless they get a little less picky, so they’ll chow down if Seal is what’s who’s on the menu instead.
And that tracks with the historical data. The team researched polar bear attacks back to the 1870s, and found that polar bears had been most likely to attack humans in 2010 through 2014. Oh, and as the ice melts, more humans will show up to work and play in the Arctic. So before you book that Canadian tour, maybe ask yourself if you want to experience the most famous scene of The Revenant firsthand.
(Via The Washington Post)
