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Polar Bear Eats Cub: Cannibalism May Be On The Rise (GRAPHIC PHOTOS)

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Polar Bear Eats Cub: Cannibalism May Be On The Rise (GRAPHIC PHOTOS).

Cannibalism is not a part of polar bears’ M.O. The animals normally refrain from feasting on their own kind.

But desperate times apparently call for quite disturbing measures. Just ask photojournalist Jenny E. Ross.

In July 2010, BBC News reports that Ross witnessed a polar bear killing and eating a cub in the Svalbard archipelago of the Arctic. She recently presented her photos and story at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, and her paper covering the event has been published in the journal Arctic, co-authored by polar bear specialist Dr. Ian Stirling.

SCROLL DOWN FOR GRUESOME PHOTOS OF THE POLAR BEAR EATING A CUB.

Ross told BBC News that the polar bear killed the cub with sharp bites to the head, and once the bear spotted a boat, he became protective over his meal.

While this isn’t the first time that a polar bear has been seen eating a fellow bear, there has been a noticeable increase in occurrences, “particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change,” Ross told BBC News.

In 2009, The Canadian Press reported that witnesses saw up to eight males eating cubs around Churchill, Manitoba in one season. In the past, the bears were able to travel the iced-over Hudson Bay for food, but in recent years it was taking more time to freeze over. While tourism was considered a possible explanation, experts also considered that there may be a link to climate change.

Center for Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegal blogged on HuffPost about the warmer, increasingly ice-free season in western Hudson Bay, where “the bears now have to contend with ever-increasing periods of fasting on land and shorter periods out on the ice to catch the seals they need to survive. The bears here are smaller and lighter than they used to be, fewer cubs survive, and the population is declining in numbers.”

Also in 2009, a video on MSNBC reported that tourists witnessed an adult male polar bear eating a cub. Stirling said in the news report that while polar bear cannibalism always occurred, he was seeing it taking place more often. Recording the rising instances of cannibalism in the Beaufort Sea, he said, “These are things that I had never seen before in the 30 years that I’d worked in that part of the world.”

There are certain circumstances under which polar bears do feed on other bears. For example, TIME explains that a polar bear may eat its cubs if they are believed to be sick.

Extenuating cases aside, polar bears usually feed on seals. Ross wrote in Arctic that due to melting sea ice, there are fewer seals for the polar bears to feed on. “As the climate continues to warm in the Arctic and the sea ice melts earlier in the summer, the frequency of such intraspecific predation may increase.”

View photos of the polar bear eating a cub, courtesy of Jenny E. Ross.  (Click link at top of page to view other photos.

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UCLA Operation Mend Reconstructs Severely Burned Military Faces (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

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UCLA Operation Mend Reconstructs Severely Burned Military Faces (PHOTOS, VIDEO).

It was Aaron Mankin’s first chance at combat in Iraq. As a part of Operation Matador, he was going door-to-door looking for traces of weapons or explosives in an effort to sweep the insurgency towards the Syrian border. On May 11, 2005, the seventh day of the mission, Mankin and 16 other marines riding inside a 26-ton tracked vehicle drove over a roadside bomb.

“It threw us 10 feet in the air,” he said. “Seconds later, I realized I was on fire. I dove out of the back of the vehicle and dropped and rolled and rolled — so much so that I exhausted myself and just lay there burning. Thoughts of my family and friends went through my head as I laid there, waiting to die.”

6 of Mankin’s fellow marines were killed instantly by the roadside bomb. Everyone else in the vehicle was burned or otherwise wounded. Within 48 hours, Mankin had been transported to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, and was surrounded by family and friends.

“I had second and third-degree burns on both arms from my finger tips to shoulder blades. Every feature on my face was burned away,” he said. “Ears gone. Nose gone. My mouth detracted so far back that my mother had to feed me through a funnel for weeks … I wasn’t ready to look at myself for weeks. I would hold my arm up in front of my face so I could only see my eyes.”

But after nearly 40 life-saving surgeries in San Antonio, Mankin was grateful to be alive and began to resign himself to looking the way that he did. And yet, he felt like he had “more to do, more to give back” — so he began speaking out about his experience.

In November 2006, philanthropist Ron Katz, a board member at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and his late wife saw Mankin on CNN.

“Aaron’s face was extraordinarily devastated; it was in shambles,” Katz recalled. “From all of that, which would be catastrophic to most people, there was this immense wonderful personality. He told CNN that he had gone through dozens of surgeries. When asked what he was going to do next, Aaron, with his facial skin to the bone, looked up and said, ‘I have to fix the beautiful part!’”

Katz called it a “fortuitous” moment. Inspired by Mankin, Katz began to lay the groundwork for Operation Mend, a partnership program that flies patients from all over the country to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to undergo face and hand reconstructive surgeries.

“My wife and I soon realized that there were dozens of Aarons out there,” Katz said. “These men and women deserve not only the best that the Defense sector has to offer; they deserve the best that the private sector has to offer as well.”

As it happened, Mankin became Operation Mend’s first patient. In September 2007, he flew to Los Angeles to begin a series of 20 facial reconstructive surgeries at UCLA.

“They took the cartilage from what was left of my ears and put it onto my forehead. It looked like I had horns for several months,” Mankin said. “The cartilage became a ‘flap,’ which they peeled off, twisted over and folded down onto where my nose was supposed to be. Those horns became my nostrils. For several weeks, when I touched my new nose, I felt my forehead. Around my mouth, countless scar release procedures allowed me to have an adequate smile and eat a burger again.”

Mankin also opted for prosthetic ears. “In the morning, I glue them on and, at night, I take them off,” he said. “Like contacts!”

Mankin said that his new face has enabled him to be himself in public and regain a sense of who he was before his injuries occurred. Of the more than 50 other service members who have since undergone Operation Mend surgeries, he said, “Just look at their pictures and focus on the eyes. You can see a rejuvenated spirit behind those eyes.”

A full-time single dad in San Antonio, Mankin lives with his 4-year-old daughter Maddie and 3-year-old son Hunter. Operation Mend “has shown my kids that Americans want to help,” he said.

Mankin has another Operation Mend surgery scheduled for late November and anticipates it will be one of his last. “I guess I would say the marines, medical community, doctors and nurses saved my life,” he said. “My family kept me alive. And Operation Mend gave me a life worth living.”

Operation Mend is entirely funded by private contributions; click here to donate. Katz told HuffPost that he strongly encourages any veterans who may be a candidate for the surgeries contact the partnership.

Asteroid 2011: How To See ’2005 YU55′ From Earth (LIVE UPDATES, PHOTOS)

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Asteroid 2011: How To See ’2005 YU55′ From Earth (LIVE UPDATES, PHOTOS).

2005 YU55, an asteroid larger than an aircraft carrier, will whiz past Earth on Tuesday, coming so close to the home planet that it will actually travel inside the moon’s orbit.

Astronomically speaking, the asteroid will narrowly miss Earth, but NASA tells HuffPost we have nothing to worry about. Rather, it is an opportunity for astronomers to do research into the asteroid’s composition.

(SCROLL DOWN FOR LIVE UPDATES)

“There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon,” Don Yeomans, the manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program office, told Reuters last week.

According to NASA, the space rock is about 1,300 feet across and takes about 18 hours to make a full rotation. At its closest point to Earth, which will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST, the asteroid will be 202,000 miles away, or roughly .85 the distance of the moon to Earth.

Even though it’s relatively close, Asteroid 2005 YU55 can’t be seen with the naked eye. But if the stars align (yes, we had to go there), some amateur astronomers with the right equipment might be able to catch a glimpse of the asteroid as it hurtles by at a reported 30,000 miles per hour.

“The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8th from the east coast of the US,” Scott Fisher, program director of the National Science Foundation‘s Division of Astronomical Sciences told Space.com. “However! It is going to be VERY faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by.”

According to Kelly Beatty at Sky & Telescope, you’ll need a telescope with at least a 6-inch aperture to see the asteroid. It’s a nearly full moon tonight, so just like some of the meteor showers earlier this year that have been washed out, the visibility of the asteroid could also be affected by the moon’s glare.

Sky & Telescope, which has a great map of the asteroid’s path, reports that the space rock will take ten hours to move east across the sky, from Aquila to Pegasus.

Don’t fear if you lack the equipment or know-how to track the space rock. For a roughly $12 donation, you can catch a live webcast of the event from Italy’s Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory.

Do you have any plans to see the asteroid as it flies by? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check out the live updates below for the most recent information on the asteroid.

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