DNA study clarifies how Polar bears and brown bears are related

"In retrospect, I think we were wrong about the directionality of the gene flow between polar bears and Irish brown bears," she said.

March 2013. At the end of the last ice age, a population of polar bears was stranded by the receding ice on a few islands in south-eastern Alaska. Male brown bears swam across to the islands from the Alaskan mainland and mated with female polar bears, eventually transforming the polar bear population into brown bears.

Evidence for this surprising scenario emerged from a new genetic study of polar bears and brown bears led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The findings, published March 14 in PLOS Genetics, upend prevailing ideas about the evolutionary history of the two species, which are closely related and known to produce fertile hybrids.

Limited hybridisation

Previous studies suggested that past hybridization had resulted in all polar bears having genes that came from brown bears. But the new study indicates that episodes of gene flow between the two species occurred only in isolated populations and did not affect the larger polar bear population, which remains free of brown bear genes.

At the centre of the confusion is a population of brown bears that live on Alaska's Admiralty, Baranof and Chicagof Islands, known as the ABC Islands. These bears--clearly brown bears in appearance and behaviour--have striking genetic similarities to polar bears.

"This population of brown bears stood out as being really weird genetically, and there's been a long controversy about their relationship to polar bears. We can now explain it, and instead of the convoluted history some have proposed, it's a very simple story," said co-author Beth Shapiro, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

Shapiro and her colleagues analysed genome-wide DNA sequence data from seven polar bears, an ABC Islands brown bear, a mainland Alaskan brown bear, and a black bear. The study also included genetic data from other bears that was recently published by other researchers. Shapiro's team found that polar bears are a remarkably homogeneous species with no evidence of brown bear ancestry, whereas the ABC Islands brown bears show clear evidence of polar bear ancestry.

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