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Brown bear Brown bear Brown bear Polar bear Polar bear Polar bear Brown bears (also known as grizzly bears) live in diverse habitats in the northern hemisphere. They eat a variety of meat and fruit. Polar bears live in the Arctic to the north on ice sheets and hunt seals. Brown bears and polar bears also have different anatomy and behavior. DNA analysis estimates that brown bears and polar bears diverged from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago, and they each form a monophyletic clade (see phylogeny image). But occasionally, at the edges of their ranges, they do meet and interbreed, producing fertile hybrid offspring sometimes called "grolar bears." Question: In your opinion, should brown bears and polar bears be considered separate species? Justify your opinion with at least one species concept or type of speciation discussed in this class. Note: There is no right/wrong opinion (yes/no on the question of separate species), but your justification must make sense based on what you've learned in this class about species concepts.

          Brown bear
Brown bear
Brown bear
Polar bear
Polar bear
Polar bear
Brown bears (also known as grizzly bears) live in diverse habitats in the northern hemisphere. They eat a variety of meat and fruit. Polar bears live in the Arctic to the north on ice sheets and hunt seals. Brown bears and polar bears also have different anatomy and behavior. DNA analysis estimates that brown bears and polar bears diverged from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago, and they each form a monophyletic clade (see phylogeny image). But occasionally, at the edges of their ranges, they do meet and interbreed, producing fertile hybrid offspring sometimes called "grolar bears."
Question: In your opinion, should brown bears and polar bears be considered separate species? Justify your opinion with at least one species concept or type of speciation discussed in this class.
Note: There is no right/wrong opinion (yes/no on the question of separate species), but your justification must make sense based on what you've learned in this class about species concepts.

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Brown bear
Brown bear
Brown bear
Polar bear
Polar bear
Polar bear
Brown bears (also known as grizzly bears) live in diverse habitats in the northern hemisphere. They eat a variety of meat and fruit. Polar bears live in the Arctic to the north on ice sheets and hunt seals. Brown bears and polar bears also have different anatomy and behavior. DNA analysis estimates that brown bears and polar bears diverged from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago, and they each form a monophyletic clade (see phylogeny image). But occasionally, at the edges of their ranges, they do meet and interbreed, producing fertile hybrid offspring sometimes called "grolar bears."
Question: In your opinion, should brown bears and polar bears be considered separate species? Justify your opinion with at least one species concept or type of speciation discussed in this class.
Note: There is no right/wrong opinion (yes/no on the question of separate species), but your justification must make sense based on what you've learned in this class about species concepts.

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Biology for AP Courses

Julianne Zedalis, John Eggebrecht

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Brown bears (also known as grizzly bears) live in diverse habitats in the northern hemisphere. They eat a variety of meat and fruit. Polar bears live in the Arctic to the north on ice sheets and hunt seals. Brown bears and polar bears also have different anatomy and behavior. DNA analysis estimates that brown bears and polar bears diverged from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago, and they each form a monophyletic clade (see phylogeny image). But occasionally, at the edges of their ranges, they do meet and interbreed, producing fertile hybrid offspring sometimes called "grolar bears." Question: In your opinion, should brown bears and polar bears be considered separate species? Justify your opinion with at least one species concept or type of speciation discussed in this class. Note: There is no right or wrong opinion (yes/no on the question of separate species), but your justification must make sense based on what you've learned in this class about species concepts.

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00:01 Polar bears and brown bears.

00:03 They live in diverse habitats in the northern hemisphere.

00:05 They had a variety of meat and fruit.

00:07 Polar bears live in the arctic to the north on the ice sheets and hunt seals, and brown bears and polar bears also have different anatomy and behavior.

00:14 Dna analysis estimates that brown bears and polar bears diverge from common ancestors about 400 ,000 years ago.

00:20 They each form of monophyllactic clade.

00:23 But occasionally at the edge of their ranges, they do meet and interbreed, producing infertile offspring, sometimes called grouler bears.

00:31 In your opinion, should brown bears and polar bears be considered separate species, justify your opinion, at least one species concept, or type of speciation discussed in this class? there's no right or wrong answer for this, but we're going to go over the possible things that could happen with this.

00:52 The first one, we have, this is a polar bear, they're sometimes called groller bears, pizzley bears.

00:58 There's a mixture of the two, and there's a couple species concepts that we want to go over.

01:02 First off, we have the biological concept, which pretty much means that if any two species can get together to have children, then they are the same species.

01:13 Now, a caveat to this is the children of that species also have to be able to have offspring too.

01:20 So right here we have a picture of a mule, which is a mixture between a donkey and a horse.

01:24 Now, this isn't a species that can have, you know, a mixture of the two, but these things are infertile and can't have any more children.

01:32 So you can't qualify mules as species.

01:36 Groiler bears can have children with either a polar bear or grizzly bear or other grower bears, so they could be qualified as on a biological concept...

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