A research team from a Polish scientific station caught on camera a polar bear hunting a reindeer.
A polar bear chases a reindeer into the water, drags it onto the beach and devours it in a scene that has never been filmed before.
With the sea ice melting, the king may be changing his diet.
In the summer of 2020, the sea ice retreats and takes with it the seals that make up the polar bear's main source of food, in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
A research team from a Polish scientific station caught a polar bear hunting a reindeer for the first time.
The video shows a young female chasing a male reindeer into the water, catching and killing him, and then pulling him on shore to eat.
Izabela Kulaszewicz, a Biologist at the University of Gdansk, said that the situation was so amazing that it was like watching a documentary.
She told Agence France-Presse that the voice of a narrator in the background told her that she had to watch the event.
Down to'modern media'?
She co-authored a paper with two other researchers about the scene.
They argued that the incident was one of a series of observations that suggest polar bears are preying on animals to make up for their limited access to seals.
There are around 20,000 reindeer and 300 sedentary polar bears in Svalbard, which is just over 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole.
There are around 20,000 reindeer and around 300 sedentary bears in Svalbard, which is just over 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole.
According to the article's authors, there are indications that polar bears have been hunting reindeer more frequently in recent decades.
The number of reindeer on the island has been steadily rising since a 1925 hunting ban, and the bears are stranding on land because of the retreating sea ice.
They suggest that eating reindeer is a matter of both necessity and opportunity.
Some experts caution against reading too much into the incident.
"If polar bears were killing reindeer in the 60s and 70s, it would have been very rare to have seen them, as there were few people, few bears, and few reindeer", said Andrew Derocher, a professor at the University of Alberta.
He said that with modern media everyone has a camera, social media and the "news" spreads fast.
Opportunistic hunters.
polar bears are known to feed on eggs, birds, rodents, and even dolphins, while high-fat, high-calorie ringed and bearded seals make up their main diet.
The bears have grown longer due to global warming and reindeer are a good complement.
The polar bear is the apex predator of the north.
Two days after the Polish researchers filmed their video, a polar bear devoured another reindeer carcass.
Jon Aars, co-author of the article, said that reindeer can be important for some polar bears.
The new diet wouldn't make a difference in bolstering the animal's population size.
"I think there is little significance at the population level for either polar bears or reindeer, even if an occasional successful predator attempt is good in the short-term for an individual bear or two (and the media)," said professor Ian Stirling, of the Canadian Wildlife Service.
The polar bears have a Latin name that means "strong swimmers", but they can't keep up with reindeer on land.
The hunting ban in the Svalbard cousins has made them less vulnerable than the North American reindeer.
"Caribou are larger animals and have co-evolved with land predators, namely wolves, wolverines, and barren ground grizzlies, making them more challenging prey," saidGeoff York of the organisation.
The polar bears of Svalbard are in dire need of protection.
There isn't enough ice to sustain a polar bear population.
I think the Barents Sea polar bear population will disappear this century.
2021.
There is a rare hunting scene that raises questions over the polar bear diet.
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