“Pihoqahiak” means “ever-wandering one,” and is an Inuit name for the polar bear, a creature known to roam vast expanses of sea ice, sometimes plodding thousands of kilometers a year in search of seals.
But along the fjord-cut coastline of southeast Greenland, where the sea freezes over for just a few months of the year, some isolated polar bears are surviving as homebodies.
Unlike most polar bears, these bears don’t follow the sea ice during its annual recession or move onto land to hunt. Instead, the crafty ursids stalk seals on nearby glacial mélange — a floating mishmash of icebergs, sea ice fragments and snow that persists year-round near the front of glaciers in the fjords, researchers report in the June 17 Science.
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