Speaker 1: I guess what, mango, what's that? Well? Did you know
Speaker 1: there's a polar bear jail in Churchill, Canada? So I
Speaker 1: do know that Churchill is considered the polar bear capital
Speaker 1: of the world because my mom has wanted to make
Speaker 1: a pilgrimage there forever. And I'd also heard that people
Speaker 1: there leave their cars unlocked in case you ever need
Speaker 1: to make like a quick escape from a wayward bear. White,
Speaker 1: are you serious about that? You can actually just hop
Speaker 1: into stranger's car and take shelter, which is such a
Speaker 1: weird thing. And I'm sure you can only get so
Speaker 1: much protection from a crazed bear in a car. But
Speaker 1: tell me about polar bear jail. Well, according to the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: it was built in two and it has space for
Speaker 1: twenty eight fuzzy inmates. Basically, as the town has so
Speaker 1: many bears wandering through, officials have set up a hotline
Speaker 1: for locals. It's just six seven five Bear, So if
Speaker 1: you see a bear on the outskirts of town, officials
Speaker 1: will come and try to scare it away with whatever
Speaker 1: they can use, whether it's firecrackers or sometimes rubber bullets
Speaker 1: or paint balls, and generally the bears get the hint.
Speaker 1: But if a bear decides he still wants to visit,
Speaker 1: or or worse, if a bear starts loitering in places
Speaker 1: that they shouldn't be. That's often what juvenile bears will do.
Speaker 1: That's when the threat of jail time kicks in. So
Speaker 1: the bear patrol tries to lure these big delinquents into
Speaker 1: a giant cylindrical trap baited with seal meat, and when
Speaker 1: the cage snaps shut, they truck them off to the
Speaker 1: polar bear jail. Of course, sometimes the bears aren't hungry
Speaker 1: and they just have to use tranquilizers. But the system
Speaker 1: actually works pretty well, so this doesn't sound like do process.
Speaker 1: But how long do these bears get sentenced for? Generally
Speaker 1: it actually is a few months, and they keep them
Speaker 1: there until the weather gets colder or the water freezes over,
Speaker 1: and then the older and hopefully wiser bears get sprung
Speaker 1: back to their old neighborhoods and they'll hopefully turn over
Speaker 1: a new leaf in the process. But that's just the
Speaker 1: first of nine facts on bears we're covering today, So
Speaker 1: let's dive in. M Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to
Speaker 1: part time genius. I'm Will Pearson. And as always, I'm
Speaker 1: joined by my good friend Manes Ticketter and sitting behind
Speaker 1: the soundproof glass wearing two big lobster claws and a
Speaker 1: shirt that says what does it say? Says? Sometimes I share?
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'm shellfish. That's our Palin producer Tristan McNeil, what
Speaker 1: I love interesting, gets all dressed off as usual. But
Speaker 1: I think we forgot to tell him that we were
Speaker 1: changing the topic from lobsters to bears things. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: Tristan will update the calendar soon. He just looks so
Speaker 1: sad pinching those lobster claws, and I mean, do you
Speaker 1: have at least one lobster fact you could share to
Speaker 1: make him feel a little better? You know? I don't? Okay,
Speaker 1: well either, I do have some bear facts the trick.
Speaker 1: So I know you started with a story on polar bears,
Speaker 1: but do you know there's actually a bear known as
Speaker 1: a pizzley bear. Sometimes it's also called a groller bear,
Speaker 1: and basically it's a polar bear grizzly bear combination or hybrid,
Speaker 1: and mostly the sort of breeding is occurred in captivity.
Speaker 1: It produces like a really beautiful white bear with light
Speaker 1: brown patches, but Canadian hunters have been finding more and
Speaker 1: more of these Pizlis in the wild, and they think
Speaker 1: that the inner bear romances trend will continue because of
Speaker 1: global warming, though actually the two bears have actually lived
Speaker 1: in overlapping territories for a while. That's pretty interesting. I've
Speaker 1: never heard of either of those, the Pizley or the
Speaker 1: groller bears. So what are these hybrid bears like in
Speaker 1: terms of their behaviors, because those are two pretty different
Speaker 1: types of bears. Do we know much about them? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, some hybrids can't mate, but these are definitely
Speaker 1: not sterile. They can continue to mate, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: They actually tend to take on the polar bears hunting skills,
Speaker 1: so they can be aggressive and pretty skilled hunters, but
Speaker 1: they're not actually as good at swimming as pure bred polars.
Speaker 1: So you know, polar bears can actually swim for a
Speaker 1: hundred miles continuously, and and they can't go that far.
Speaker 1: But in the long run, scientists actually think these Pizlis
Speaker 1: will probably be successful by mating more and more with
Speaker 1: grizzly bears than polar bears. And that's just because the
Speaker 1: numbers favor that, and also how the environment seems to
Speaker 1: be going. What is interesting, though, this isn't the only
Speaker 1: hybrid species that comes out of climate change. Pacific Standard
Speaker 1: magazine has written that bluga whales are mating with nar
Speaker 1: walls to create nar lugas. At the very least fun
Speaker 1: to say. I mean, that definitely sounds made up. I
Speaker 1: think I was probably in my twenties before somebody convinced
Speaker 1: me that nar walls were actually a real thing. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So these nar luga's, that's crazy. I do think it's
Speaker 1: funny when you get these names like legger's and bee flows.
Speaker 1: They're kind of fun to say. But there's some that
Speaker 1: are just terrible, like jag lions and dog wolves, which
Speaker 1: honestly just feels lazy to be. All right. So here's
Speaker 1: a strange one, and it sounds like an urban ledge
Speaker 1: and but it's actually true. There was this man in
Speaker 1: China who bought two puppies on the border of China
Speaker 1: and Vietnam, and then he took them home. I guess
Speaker 1: they looked like little black chow chows, and so he
Speaker 1: fed them and he groomed them, and then things started
Speaker 1: to get a little weird. They wanted more and more food.
Speaker 1: They started feasting on his chickens, and then they grew
Speaker 1: to a hundred pounds. But he only fully realized he'd
Speaker 1: been duped when he read a government flyer about bear safety,
Speaker 1: and then he recognized the animals in the picture. It
Speaker 1: became pretty clear to them that he was actually the
Speaker 1: proud owner of two Asian black bear cubs. So now
Speaker 1: they live in a sanctuary where they get to eat
Speaker 1: more than just dog food, thankfully. That's pretty funny. Actually,
Speaker 1: this is super weird, and I'm sure I've told you
Speaker 1: this before, but my my grandfather was in the forestry service.
Speaker 1: Then one day when he was on tour, he found
Speaker 1: these three bear cubs whose mother had been shot. I
Speaker 1: think the mom and bear couldn't give milk, so she
Speaker 1: was aggressive and attacking the town. But he and his
Speaker 1: colleagues found these bears, so he brought one of them
Speaker 1: back with him. And the story was that my mom
Speaker 1: had a pet bear for a little bit until they
Speaker 1: could place into sanctuary. And so like, my mom is
Speaker 1: unafraid of any animal. But the funny part and the
Speaker 1: thing we always used to teach my grandmother about was like,
Speaker 1: how did she let a pet bear in the house?
Speaker 1: And she always just said like she thought it was
Speaker 1: a dog, and I guess there must be some sort
Speaker 1: of resemblance. She was just like willfully ignoring the fact
Speaker 1: that my grandfather was bringing these ridiculous baby animals home
Speaker 1: for the water is great, but my fact. So, since
Speaker 1: we're talking about Cubs, here's the fact about the Chicago
Speaker 1: Cubs and how they got their name. So you know,
Speaker 1: even though I'm not a huge baseball fan, I do
Speaker 1: love the strange team names that stick around for little
Speaker 1: bits of time. Like in Brooklyn, the baseball team was
Speaker 1: called the Brooklyn Bridegrooms for a season, and I guess
Speaker 1: this is because like a number of them all got
Speaker 1: married in one season and that's just the nickname they
Speaker 1: took on. And similarly, the Cubs used to be called
Speaker 1: the White Stockings, which you know isn't particularly useful since
Speaker 1: they also have the White Sox in Chicago. And then
Speaker 1: they lost their manager, who's called Track wasn't renewed, I guess,
Speaker 1: and the team went by the name the Chicago Orphan,
Speaker 1: so sad, you know, it's sad, And they were horrible
Speaker 1: because obviously teams aren't great when they don't have managers.
Speaker 1: But then they started rebuilding the team with these super
Speaker 1: talented players, but all of them were really really young,
Speaker 1: and that's how they got the name the Cubs. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't like the super formal name. Apparently there's the
Speaker 1: site Wrigley Ivy and it says that young players were
Speaker 1: commonly called cubs or cults or you know, other young
Speaker 1: animal names. But then this type that are in Chicago
Speaker 1: may have accidentally like capitalized the description in print, and
Speaker 1: that nickname stuck. I do like this idea that a
Speaker 1: team could have a different name every couple of years,
Speaker 1: just based on something the team has been up to,
Speaker 1: or like this idea if they all got married so
Speaker 1: they were the bride groups. But actually I looked up
Speaker 1: to Chicago Bears and I've got a quick one about
Speaker 1: the Super Bowls shuffle. So did you realize it was
Speaker 1: nominated for a Grammy? I mean, it is such a
Speaker 1: novelty song and it's hard to imagine any critics actually
Speaker 1: liking it. Well, the stray in this part is that
Speaker 1: it was beat out by Prince and the Revolutions Kiss
Speaker 1: and thank thank goodness it was beat out. If it
Speaker 1: had beaten that song, that's ridiculous and it's crazy to
Speaker 1: think that they were even in the same category. But
Speaker 1: one other thing I didn't realize, but the year the
Speaker 1: Bears won the Super Bowl was also the year of
Speaker 1: the Challenger disaster, and that happened around the same time.
Speaker 1: So the team actually never got to visit the White
Speaker 1: House for for understandable reasons. But they did eventually get
Speaker 1: to go when fellow Chicago and Barack Obama invited the
Speaker 1: team to the White House twenty five years later. I mean,
Speaker 1: that is crazy that they had to wait twenty five
Speaker 1: years for the kind of amazing that it happened. Well,
Speaker 1: since we've moved into sports and pop culture, there's a
Speaker 1: Fozzy Bear fact. I was trying to slip into the
Speaker 1: Sesame Street episode. We did a couple of episodes back,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't do it because he's more of a muppet.
Speaker 1: Is the fact that that you keep sending me Fozzy
Speaker 1: Bear jokes from Twitter? Is that? Is that what your
Speaker 1: fact is? I mean, they're so corny. Actually, have you
Speaker 1: seen that Mike particularly especial where he talks about the
Speaker 1: one time he had to follow Fozzy Bear on a
Speaker 1: comedy tour, like Fozzy Bear open for him and he said,
Speaker 1: it was so difficult because, you know, any bad joke
Speaker 1: Fozzy tells, he's beloved because it was Waca Waca walk along,
Speaker 1: the audience just eats it up, and he's a friendly
Speaker 1: a hard act to follow up. The one thing I
Speaker 1: was going to say was that on the original Muppet Show,
Speaker 1: the gag was that Fozzy Bear would tell jokes that
Speaker 1: were so bad that he'd then get no reaction and
Speaker 1: he gets so upset that you get depressed or even
Speaker 1: start to cry. And you know, that sounds funny and theory,
Speaker 1: but apparently the audiences didn't know what to do, like
Speaker 1: they mostly just felt bad for him, and it made
Speaker 1: the segments really really awkward. So when Henson and Frank
Speaker 1: Oz were retooling the character, they played down the sympathy
Speaker 1: aspects and just made him this sort of eternally optimistic,
Speaker 1: deluted bear who you know, still gets tomatoes and tomatoes
Speaker 1: soup thrown at him, but he believes he's crushing it
Speaker 1: on stage every time. Also, they friendly retooled his eyebrows
Speaker 1: in the process, because they used to make Fozzy Bear
Speaker 1: frown more, you know, when he was getting upset, and
Speaker 1: they had this apparatus built in the puppet that frank
Speaker 1: Oz could like pull so that the eyebrows shifted down,
Speaker 1: but then the hat mostly covered them up and they
Speaker 1: retooled the characters, so then they dropped that element. All right,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna try to bring this back to real bears.
Speaker 1: Nothing gets fozzy, right, But I actually like reading about
Speaker 1: all the unusual skills that they have. They have this
Speaker 1: incredible sense of smell and and this is how extreme
Speaker 1: it gets. So there's seven times better smelling than a bloodhound.
Speaker 1: A polar bear can actually smell seals from twenty miles away,
Speaker 1: and can smell a seal under the ice through its
Speaker 1: breathing hole from a mile over as it really is.
Speaker 1: And so they're also pretty crafty. This is according to
Speaker 1: metal Flaws. They will roll rocks into a bear trap
Speaker 1: in order to set them off. But the most intriguing
Speaker 1: thing to me was that bears are apparently good at math.
Speaker 1: This comes from nat Geo, and it says bears actually
Speaker 1: have the largest brain of any carnivore, and scientists wanted
Speaker 1: to find out whether they could count, so they set
Speaker 1: up these side by side tug screens where bears would
Speaker 1: have to paw or touch their nose to the screen
Speaker 1: with more dots on them, and when they picked the
Speaker 1: screen with more dots, they got a little treat. Apparently
Speaker 1: bears are very motivated by treats. And as scientists kept
Speaker 1: varying the size and the colors of the dots, you know,
Speaker 1: there might have been fifteen tiny dots on one screen
Speaker 1: and twelve on another, these genius bears kept picking the
Speaker 1: right one. In fact, the biggest problem with the study
Speaker 1: ended up being that all the bears wanted to participate
Speaker 1: at the same time, and the scientists didn't have enough
Speaker 1: testing stations for them. You know, like I said, they
Speaker 1: are very motivated by treats. Well, we've still got two
Speaker 1: more bear facts as you get to but before we do,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius.
Speaker 1: So you know, well, I was thinking about that story
Speaker 1: you told about that dude who bought two dogs and
Speaker 1: they turned out to be bears, and it reminded me
Speaker 1: of this great story about Lord Byron at college. Apparently,
Speaker 1: the rule at Cambridge was that you couldn't have dogs
Speaker 1: on campus, and Byron was so irritated that he decided
Speaker 1: to like skirt the rules, and he decided to go
Speaker 1: out and get himself a bear, like a team bear,
Speaker 1: and there were of course no explicit rules about having
Speaker 1: a bear on campus, though I guess he got away
Speaker 1: with it, and he had actually frequently walking around campus
Speaker 1: on a leash. But the funniest part is that people
Speaker 1: kept asking him what are you gonna do with that bear?
Speaker 1: And his standard reply was he was going to try
Speaker 1: to get him enrolled at the school and have him
Speaker 1: sit for a fellowship. Apparently that part of the plan
Speaker 1: never came through. Wow, that's pretty crazy. So is that
Speaker 1: what you're using for your last fact? Actually, I've got
Speaker 1: another one I want to do, so I actually think
Speaker 1: this is pretty interesting. And I realized this when I
Speaker 1: was reading a Barnstein Bears book about Easter to my daughter,
Speaker 1: and as I was reading it, I realized it was
Speaker 1: less about the chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunt, and
Speaker 1: there was a little more overt religion in there than
Speaker 1: I was expecting. You know, it was more explicit that
Speaker 1: then i'd remembered. And I guess I was a little
Speaker 1: confused because I started wondering, like I had the Berenstein
Speaker 1: Bears always been talking about religion like jars of Clay
Speaker 1: and then I just hadn't picked up on it, you know,
Speaker 1: And I've been confused about this stuff in the past year,
Speaker 1: like not growing up Christian. I didn't realize that Aslan
Speaker 1: and uh lyon the Witch and the Wardrobe was supposed
Speaker 1: to be christ until one of my best friends pointed
Speaker 1: out to me. Or I remember finding Archie comics online
Speaker 1: and there's this one where Archie gets religious and uh
Speaker 1: he converts a hippie. Really, yeah, it was because the
Speaker 1: comic got licensed to a Christian publisher for a bit. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I was curious that the Behrenstein Bears had like some
Speaker 1: sort of similar agreement. But it turns out that it's
Speaker 1: Jen and Stan Berenstein's son, Michael, who's been inserting more
Speaker 1: religious titles in the mix. And apparently when stand passed away,
Speaker 1: Michael actually stepped in to help his mom keep writing books,
Speaker 1: and he'd apparently made his name by writing Christian themed
Speaker 1: books for about thirty years. So, according to mental Floss,
Speaker 1: when you see a title like the Berenstein Bears Show
Speaker 1: God Love the Barrenstein Bears say their prayers? Who are
Speaker 1: the Barrenstein Bears go to Sunday School? That generally indicates
Speaker 1: he's the one who wrote it. That's interesting. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: since we're sticking with fictional bears here, I'm going to
Speaker 1: join you with a Paddington fact. So did you know
Speaker 1: that Paddington was originally written to be from Africa? Um?
Speaker 1: I mean, the only recent thing I know about Hayington
Speaker 1: was a he switched from eating marmalade to marmite sandwiches.
Speaker 1: So this ad Kevin and people were pissed. I bet
Speaker 1: they were. They felt like Packington was a sellout. I mean,
Speaker 1: I knew that Payington's from Darkest Peru, but why was
Speaker 1: he from Africa before that? Well, this was a last
Speaker 1: minute adjustment and it was pointed out to author Michael
Speaker 1: Bond that bears don't really live in Africa, so he
Speaker 1: pivoted to Darkness Peru and that's where he based his
Speaker 1: creature on this spectacled bear. Well, I mean, I liked
Speaker 1: a lot of these bear facts. I've got to say
Speaker 1: my favorite was that bears can do math problems. So
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna take the trophy this week. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. It's an honor, and thank you
Speaker 1: guys for this thing. We'll be back with a full
Speaker 1: length episode tomorrow. M