Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Polar Bear Attack - Matt Dyer and the Weaponized Flare Gun

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

In 2013, Matt Dyer ventured out to northern Canada hoping to spot a polar bear. He ended up getting an up-close view of one, and it turned into a fight for his life. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let's be honest. Buying cannabis shouldn't be complicated, sketchy or low quality. That's why I want to tell you about mood.com. That's M-O-O-O-D.com. Mood ships federally legal cannabis straight to your door. No medical card, no hassle. And here's the kicker. The quality is better than anything you'll find at your local dispensary. Yeah, I said it. Whether you're into edibles, concentrates, flour, or just looking to explore, you'll find it all at mood. And it's not just the that makes them stand out. Every product is sourced from small American-owned family farms that care deeply about what they grow. It's cannabis you can trust, delivered discreetly, and ready to elevate your mood. And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order. Just head to mood.com. That's M-O-O-O-D.com to get started. Hello, everyone. This is Jeff Larson, West Larson, and Mike Smith, and it's Morbin time. This is the Morbin podcast where we talk about Jared Leto as Morbius. He turns into Dracula, but he's a good guy.

He turns into Dracula? Also, I'd rather die than do that podcast. But today we're talking about Madam Webb, where she did. A little more. And one of the worst Marvel movies ever, the worst actor ever. Wes is a wildlife by all. So Wes knows all about vampires and morbin. Right.

I just came up with a good idea. Let's just roll with me real quick, Wes. The Morbin Tabernacle Choir. What do you think of that? I actually like that quite a bit. It's a good idea for a sequel. Yeah. Dude, it would liven things up so much if they were just like,

and now it's morbid time. And cut to the choir every time. In the sequel, Jared Leto just joins. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I tune in. That's the whole story. No, I had my wires crossed. We're tooth and claw podcast, and we like animals and we like talking about animals.

Yeah, let me do a quick explanation of what we do here on this year podcast. I thought I did it. Are you about to? We like animals. What did he leave out? You know, I think we should do this more off. Yeah. Additioned by subtraction here.

We are tooth and claw. podcast. I'm a wildlife biologist. I've worked the number of different species, most, like, primarily with bears for the last 12 years. And during that time, I would read a lot about how, you know, animal attacks in the news and how the animals were often demonized or the attacks were sensationalized. So we got the idea of doing a podcast where we could talk about those stories. People love those stories. They're fascinating stories. But do it without sensationalizing, without demonizing the animals and help people learn a little bit in the process. You know, you get to learn about why these things happened and knowledge is power,

and it helps people then go out and recreate safely. And in today's episode, we're going to learn quite a bit. It's going to be a good one. So put your learning caps on. Well, you think you know so much about animals. Then why don't you tell me what animal Mr. Ed was? Oh, man, that was the dumbest thing. So we're in Australia, and my dad was just getting tired of, like, not talking, I think.

He was in the back of the van. And that's, like, verbatim what he said to all three of us. He says, if you boys think you know so much about animals, tell me what kind of animal Mr. Ed was. And I, like, was, like, a quarter horse. And he's like, nope. He was a zebra. Yeah. And then all three of us were like, yeah, painted like a horse.

And all three of us were just like, no. No, that's not true. There's no way. And I know people that have worked with zebras, and they say zebras are really hard to work with. And so I was like, that can't be right. And Mike gets online and finds all this stuff that says it's not true and tells my dad.

And then like five minutes later, we hear my dad reading, and he's reading all this stuff saying that Mr. Ed was a zebra. Well, yeah, we're arguing for a bit. I have a couple notes. I'm going to chime in real quick. Okay, read your notes. And we were like arguing with him. Like, that doesn't sound right at all.

And then mom was like, maybe they just did the lips. And I was like, what does that mean? And she goes, I don't know. We asked her like four times. And she would answer then. And finally, they're like, mom, what is just the lips mean? She's like, I don't know. And then we're like quiet for like a little bit.

And then Gil just goes, our dad just goes, here it is. And brings it back up. And then, yeah, go ahead, Wes. And then Mike's like, Gilbert, what's the website you're reading from? Is it snopes.com? After you, like, read off. But Mike let him read off, like, a ton of, like, it was this zebra that was super well-trained that lived on a farm and it worked better than a horse.

So then they just started painting it like a horse. And he like, I really heard his feelings. I didn't, I didn't mean to. I just didn't know how else to, like, give it to him easy. that he was basically hanging himself by reading. Because you had read it already. Right. Yeah.

And then we had to explain to him what Snopes was, how Snopes's like is a myth-breaking website essentially. And you know what, Mike, it was great because I spent 20 years of my dad just being able to say anything as a fact and there was no way to really fact-check him. And then once we all got smartphones, he realized he can't do that anymore, which is great. The jig was up. He needed it. Yeah.

Yeah. That was a great moment. On our trip in Australia. I'm glad. If anyone. I took such thorough notes. Wonders where I get my koala brain from. There you go.

Oh, shots fired. Kind of had myself. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I had a pre-story category that I wanted to do. We did that on our Australia episode. I thought it was kind of fun. And I think we talked about this a little bit on our Australia news episode,

but then we had a lot more trip afterwards. So after our trip was over, which it is, I wanted to do your guys' favorite wildlife experience on our trip. The thing that, you know, you're number one. I think there are some really good ones to pick from. And I know we did this, we did this on Mike's subscriber episode as well, but we didn't do it for everyone else. So really quick, we're going to go through those. I can go first. It's really hard for me because we went great white shark diving, cage diving, and they're, you know, top two favorite animal.

but my favorite was still was seeing a cassowary in the wild for me a big part of it was the amount of time three of us yeah we put in a lot of time driving back and forth between mission beach and eddie bay and driving all around mission beach to all the hot spots that we had learned about and we just weren't seeing them and literally on our way out of town we saw two cassoiries and they were everything i wanted them to be it it felt kind of like seeing a dinosaur And for me, it was just, they're such a cool animal and I keep finding myself looking back at their photos. And even like the wallpaper on my phone right now is a picture I took of a cassowary.

So that was definitely, that was it for me. Mike, you can go. For me, it was great white sharks. It's kind of funny because we were the first group to actually get down in the tank and the water. And we struck out. We were down there for what, like 45 minutes maybe? And there was just not, we didn't see anything.

They pulled us out in like two minutes. after we got out of the water, they started showing up. And like, by that point, I had kind of convinced myself. I was like, well, the boat ride was fun and I'm just glad to be here, you know, that kind of thing, like trying to lighten the blow for myself to make it not be such a crushing disappointment. But once that happened, we all kind of looked at each other and we're like, this is this seriously happening to us right now? Like, we get out of the water and Great White Sharks start showing up around the cage. But thankfully, they got us back in the water. And we were only down there for maybe 15 minutes, a lot shorter this time.

but it was honestly like all that I needed and it was such a rush it was like being a kid on Christmas morning for me and there's a there's like a stranger off to my left and every time the sharks would just like circle counterclockwise around the boat around the cage and we just kept seeing them over and over again but every time I'd be like hitting the guy next to me the complete stranger I was like look it's the shark again and it just like it felt so good to be so excited about something like I haven't felt that feeling in so long and it was such a thrill to see them. Yeah. That's nothing. My favorite that I saw was koalas. The quallows were great. Quallas, I convinced myself that they weren't going to be that cool,

that they're just going to be like super high up in a tree and that asleep, you know, but they were moving around and like there's one on this hike we did that was so close we could have touched it. And it's just like really cute and cool to see all these koalas. And we went on a hike where we saw like five koalas, which was just awesome. And then at the very end, when we were going to leave the island where they all are, I spotted a little baby one in a tree. And I was happy that I finally found one because everyone else had found one. Yeah.

But the Great White Sharks did have me like the most amped up for a while. Like the next day I was still just riding a high from that. That was like so cool. but Great Whites didn't move up much in my ranking, if at all, and koalas moved up quite a bit. Okay. I would say with the Great Whites, too, that I almost liked seeing them from the boat as much as the water,

because, like, they were jumping out of the water, and it was crazy. Yeah, it was wild. It was really cool. Yeah, and I do think we've had a few questions from people when I have on my Instagram, too, of kind of the ethics around Cage diving with Great Whites. And so I do think in our next great white episode, I kind of want to get into that because I have talked to some shark biologists about it before I did it for the first time. And it does seem like it's kind of a gray area.

And there's some really nice pros to it and then a couple cons. So it's something we're going to talk about at some point. But I don't know. I loved it. And I actually was looking into there's another boat out there that was Rodney Fox's family that runs it. And I looked into it and they do like their minimum, I think. is like two nights and you sleep on the boat and then you're there. Wow.

You get to do like multiple dives and they'll sink their cage down to the sea floor too for divers. So that's cool. We might have to, we might have to go back at some point. Like a slumber party with the sharks. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Sounds pretty fun. Anyway. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're going to get into our episode. Oh, boy. It's,

I hope we're talking about great white sharks. We're not. Oh. We're not. But we will soon, I think. We're talking about one of my other favorite animals. We're going to talk about polar bears. This is a time of year where I think about polar bears a lot

because when I was doing polar bear field work, it was usually February, March, that I would go to the places where we were working, in northern Alaska. Yeah, to the Arctic. And it always comes back into my mind this time of year. I think about it a lot. It was a really life-changing project that I worked on.

It was my introduction to wildlife biology, really. And I just, I don't know, It's a magical place that kind of gets its talents in you. So I have been thinking about them a lot. Yeah. Before you were a lot less annoying, honestly. Now you're more like, yeah, now you're like, oh, you can't eat that fish. It's bad for the environment.

Oh, you, for sure. Oh, the earth's getting like too warm. We got to calm down with all this stuff, you know. Yeah. Paper straws. Everything I do feel, I feel bad about now. Yeah. Taylor Swift, I can't even.

like Taylor Swift because she flies in her jet to go get go to the bathroom every day. She flies too much. I haven't said word one about Taylor Swift. I've seen. I feel bad. I feel bad liking her because she uses a jet more than anyone. She does. She uses it to like go get the remote.

Yeah. All right. So I've got a number of sources for today's story. A really helpful one was the Out of Live podcast by Backpacker magazine. It's hosted by Luis. Albany's. I was actually on this podcast with Tom Smith. So my advisor, Tom, we got to be on it together. It was really fun. So check of that podcast out. Check out the episode I was on. Check it on that one out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it a podcast out. It's a spicy podcast.

Also, there's some articles in backpacker magazine that were written by Matt Dyer. Mike's so mad that I'd use that joke again. He was mad last time I used it. Oh, man. Makes me need to go lay down. Count to ten. And then an article in Sierra magazine that was written by Jake Abrahamson. So those are the sources that I mostly used. Check them all out. They're all really good. But we're going to get in the story. You guys ready? Yeah. Okay. So having lived and worked in Maine for most of his life, Matt Dyer was really well acquainted with the great outdoors.

He's a late 40s lawyer. He'd spent a lot of his free time in the woods around his home, learning about all the flora and fauna and camping and just really recreating outside as much as possible. And he's really not your typical lawyer, both in his work and his personal appearance. He's got the stringy gray hair, a really bushy gray beard. And those are hints to kind of his fascination with Nordic culture, which he was really fascinated with. He actually has a huge tattoo of the Norse tree of life on his back. Digrasil. Sweet.

Yeah, he looks like a really kind of skinny, rangy Viking. but then he's this lawyer and most of his lawyering was for low-income folks, mentally ill clients, and people that just needed legal help on their day to day. So he's not like a... That's great. Like a... Ambienn's chase or anything. Yeah, exactly.

Like, this is the kind of lawyer that I think all of us would really like to meet and see featured in like a movie. Better call Saul type of guy. Yeah. I don't know about that, but kind of. He lived in a rustic house on a country road in Maine and like a lot of other out or enthusiasts, he'd spend a lot of his time dreaming about his next big adventure. So in the winter of 2012, that dream was to go somewhere far away from his typical woods.

And when he saw that the Sierra Club, of which he was a member, was going to do a trip to Torngat Mountains National Park in Labrador, Canada, he's instantly enamored with the place. So he starts pouring over photos, and what he sees are these big, glacially carved valleys and fjords. And to Matt, who's like really interested in Norse culture and like druid culture, this looks like a place where Norse gods would live, you know? It's a place where like you might see Game of Thrones wildlings. The way to picture it in my mind, if you can't look at a photo right now, is picture you've seen those fjords in Norway and everything that are just covered in trees.

It looks like that, but no trees. Instead of trees, it's just tundral vegetation. So kind of like Iceland, if the mountains were a lot bigger and more drastic. Like the glaciers were there a lot more recently so that didn't have time to regrow type of thing? Maybe, yeah. Or it's just colder too, so there's just not vegetation getting really grow. Mike, do you still hate glaciers?

Yeah, I don't like them much. Interesting. So, yeah, when I look in, I was actually just thinking about glaciers because Wes's eyes make me think of glaciers. And it finally clicked why I get so mad when I make eye contact. with Wes. You think of glaciers. Yeah, they're kind of glacial in color, you know? Yeah, sure.

I'm not going to look at you anymore. Someone told me I had dead fish eyes once, which. Oh, that's just interesting. And false. Well, she was from Korea, and so I don't think she was used to, like, seeing. Oh, so that's like a compliment. Yeah, that's a compliment over there, I think. I guess.

All right. So Torngat Mountains National Park sees less than 1,000 visitors per year. And there are no roads or campgrounds. It's a real wilderness park. This isn't an easy place to get to. And there really aren't people there. It is a real bastion for wildlife. There's lots of amazing wildlife there.

It's a really cool place to visit. So in some of the pictures Matt was looking at on the internet, he noticed there's caribou, there can be wolves, tarmigan, whales, seals. And most prominently in these pictures was polar bears. Excema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to disappear eczema.

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at lily.com or call 1-800 LilyRX or 100 545-979. All right. So we're not going to spend a ton of time on polar bear biology today because we've gone over them a couple times. We've talked quite a bit about them. We are going to talk a bit about camping because that's kind of, I guess some of our other attacks involved camping, but it's not something we talked about too much. But I am going to go over some quick facts on polar bears just for people that maybe haven't listened to those other episodes. They swim 90 miles. They can swim pretty far, yeah. No, not a number. I read that they walk 20 miles a day, but then when they swim, they'll swim like 90 miles. They can swim really, really far, yes.

Not always. Sometimes they'll just swim a tiny bit, like a stone's throat, but they can also swim really far. All right, so as I mentioned before, I got my start in polar bears. I did seven field seasons on polar bears. I produced a polar bear paper

talking about disturbances in the oil field, that might affect denning females. This is an animal I know pretty well that I've spent a lot of time learning about and working with, but I'm still learning new things about them every time we do a polar bear episode. So something that we talked about,

but I think is important for people to know, they are the largest terrestrial carnivore. So you guys can't see it, but I'm doing terrestrial in quotation marks because they're also classified as a marine mammal. As aquatic. Yeah, so this is kind of an animal that fills both niches,

but they are technically the largest terrestrial carnivore. I do like sometimes people, sometimes people say I heard Codiac brown bears are larger. That's not necessarily true. Codiac brown bears or coastal brown bears can get as big as a polar bear, but on average, polar bears are bigger. And like the biggest bear ever is like a polar bear, right? Like recorded? Yeah, I believe so.

I'm not sure about that, but I believe so. I'm pretty sure that's true. Adult male polar bears average between 350 and 600 kilograms, which is about 775 to 1,300 pounds. That's their average. So their average, the low end of their average, is the high end for grizzly bears. Like a 700-pound grizzly bear is a really big grizzly bear. But polar bears of 1,500 pounds or even larger have been reported. And there are male polar bears that have been estimated by experts to be close to 2,000 pounds.

So that's a really, really big animal. Huge. A male, a really big male when it's... And icy. No, that's polar bears. He's talking grizzly bears. No, I'm talking about polar bears. I thought you said grizzly bears can get...

I messed up. Shoot. Yeah. Do you think other polar bears get mad at the icy polar bear for encouraging people to eat all that ice? There's not a lot of ice left up there. I don't think so. He's pretty cool, too.

He'd be hard to get mad at. He's having fun with global warming. He's like snowboarding on chunks of melting ice and stuff. Like he's... Yeah. At least he has like a good vibe. That's what I... That's what I try to do with it.

You know, West always is like all the other polar bears. He's a real glass half empty gun, a guy. There's plenty of water to fill that glass now that the polar ice caps are melting. Okay. I feel like polar bears hold more... of their weight in their ass than grizzly bears when they get big. Grizzly bears get like such fat stomachs. But polar bears, they get some junk in the trunk.

I think it's because we're used to seeing, when the grizzlies get really fat, we're used to seeing those ones on salmon streams where they put it all on at once. And then it does really sit in their stomach. But really big polar bears are putting it on over time. So it does tend to go. They're walking a ton. Yeah. Is there like a fat polar bear?

week where they just like eat a ton of seals and we watch them just like gorgeing on baby seals and stuff there's not but i wish there was because they could sure use a week like that where they just have i don't think i'd want to watch that that's the difference between me and you mike all right so when a male polar bear stands on its hind legs it can be almost 10 feet tall this is a very big animal yeah it's hard to kind of until you see one it's hard to really explain just how imposing they can as an animal. I should know they're highly sexually dimorphic, so females are roughly half the weight of the males. And just for people, I think we've gotten this question again a few times. When it comes to sexual dimorphism, this doesn't necessarily always mean size. Sexual dimorphism

can be any aspect of their morphology. Their morphology is their form or structure. So it can be color, it can be size, it can be fur patterns. There's just a lot of different things it can be. One of them's morbin. Jeff. Morbology. Sneak that in before I could. All right. Polar bears are also the only bear species

that is an obligate carnivore. So a lot of our other bears we talk about will eat meat when they find it or when they get lucky enough. But polar bears, all the polar bears and all 19 subpopulations, all across the Arctic and subarctic, they eat marine mammal blubber.

That is what they eat. That is their bread and butter. That is the thing that they must consume in order to survive. And that specifically comes from seals. Ring seals are their most common prey. Bearded seals are the second most common prey for them. A number of other seal species can be killed by polar bears. They've also been known to kill certain whale species like beluga whales or narwhal have been killed by polar bears.

Blubber is really the only thing that can sustain a polar bear in the Arctic. and that's because energy demands are really high for them. They can eat up to 100 pounds of seal blubber in a single feeding, which is quite a bit. Oh, man. They're also able to assimilate about 97% of the fat that they eat. So that means that fat is almost directly converted into fat on the polar bear. So when we eat a lot of fat,

we tend to like poop a lot of it out or not assimilate it. And that's not the case with polar bears. Like it goes pretty much straight onto their bodies. Oh, that's cool. Unless you're trying to lose weight. Yeah, I guess. It wouldn't be great for humans if you're trying to lose weight. It would just go straight onto your body.

When the hunting's really good, you'll see polar bears just eating blubber from the seals that they catch and they'll leave the rest of the animal for scavengers. So, like, Arctic Fox will follow polar bears around. Other scavengers will follow them around because when the hunting's good, they're not going to eat a lot of the seal. And then spring is one of the best times for them

because seal pups are being born and they can find those pups out on the ice. like out on the open ice, or they find them in shallow layers where the seal pups will rest. And so you'll see polar bears kind of walk out on the ice. And they do essentially the same thing like a fox or a coyote will do when they're looking for rodents under the ice. Oh, cool. They'll sniff out a seal in this layer and then they jump up in the air, collapse that layer,

and grab the seal pup before it can get into the water. And they eat a lot of seal pups in the spring. This is the best time of year for them. they ate a lot of them. Wow, that would be cool this. Yeah. One of their other strategies is seals in the Arctic, they will cut like between 10 to 15 breathing holes per seal in the ice.

They use these really sharp claws they have on their four flippers and they'll scratch the ice until they get a hole in it. And then they keep those breathing holes open all winter and the seal will just kind of go in between these different breathing holes that it's maintaining and use them to get air. And what a polar bear will do is essentially, just will find one of these holes and just wait by it. And sometimes they'll wait for hours or even days for the seal to pop up in that specific

hole. And when it does, the polar bear is right there and it grabs it with its sharp claws, pulls it out on the ice and eats it. So it's a pretty good strategy. It works really well for them. Yeah. Can you imagine waiting like three days and then missing your chance? Just like your brain goes blank for two seconds.

And the seal's like, booboo, up and down. Yeah, you're like, it's got to happen all the time. zoning out. Yeah. Well, imagine being a seal where, like, you have to breathe, and it's just like, what if there's a freaking polar bear just waiting up there? You're just holding your breath as long as you can to, like, knocky eaten by a potential polar bear.

That'd be scared. Yeah, it always makes me think of Russian roulette for them, because they have, like, between 10 to 15 holes that they're popping up in. Yeah. I wonder if this one's got a bear on top of it. Yeah. And then their final strategy that they'll use is some bears will just, when seals pull themselves up, haul out on the ice, a bear will actually stalk it by swimming around in the water and trying to sneak up on the seal while it's out on the open ice.

But that's a less effective strategy. It's much harder for them to catch a seal like that. These breathing hole, stocking and grabbing seal pups in their dens is much easier. So they have to put on a lot of weight when this hunting is good because during the summer, we've talked about this. the sea ice leaves and a lot of their subpopulations, and the hunting opportunities essentially shut down because, as we've talked about, they use the ice to hunt, and they have to fast throughout the summer. So this would be true for these bears in Torngat during the summer when Matt's planning ongoing.

It's a place where there's annual sea ice that melts and refreezes, melts and refreezes, and the bears have to wait for it to refreeze before they can hunt again. So this is an important point for our story. their digestive systems are so evolved to process blubber that other foods really don't do much for them aside for maybe sate their hunger for a little bit so when they start fasting in the summer some bears will try to investigate other food sources

that can be things like goose eggs geese themselves berries caribou a lot of other little things that they might try and eat and then others just lie around my heavens is this like a kind of half-British character that you're trying out for the podcast? Oh, my head is.

All right. Not my gooses. Queen Elizabeth making a guest appearance. So while some of the bears will go and investigate other food sources, other bears will essentially just lie around and wait for the ice to refreeze. And they enter kind of a walking hibernation, which we talked about in a recent listener question. But essentially their metabolism slows down.

Everything slows down and they're just waiting until they can eat again. But they're walking? No, it's called walking hibernation because there maybe it's even waking hibernation. And I'm saying that wrong. I'm pretty sure I read walking hibernation. But it pretty much just means hibernation while they're conscious. Like they're not sleeping. They're not going into a full hibernative state.

It's the bear is essentially just slowing down. Everything slows down. Mike. I'm seeing walking. Yeah, it's walking. Okay. Yep. for a second I was doubting myself, but it's walking hibernation.

There's a really interesting paper that just came out for some authors at USGS, the US Geological Survey, and they looked at fasting bears and their strategies for fasting. So they looked at a number of different bears, think in Western Hudson Bay, and they looked at some that were essentially hibernating on land doing this walking hibernation, and then others that were seeking out different food sources, and they found that all of the bears, whether or not they were doing the hibernation stuff, whether they were looking for new food, lost about a kilogram of day of weight. So a kilogram per day of weight, they were all losing on average.

So regardless of the strategy that this bear has, if it's not able to hunt marine mammals or get marine mammals, it's going to lose weight. That's just how they're built. It's a great paper. The title of that paper is Polar Bear, Energetic, and Behavioral Strategies on Land, with implications for surviving the ice-free period. I would have titled it, Polar Bear.

literally built different. Yeah. That's a better title. You need to write scientific papers, Jeff. Just the titles. Yeah. I do want to shout out a polar bear scientist that does a bit of posting on Twitter

that I really like. His name's Andrew DeR-R-O-C-H-E-R. He's someone that I've kind of tangentially worked with a little bit. If you're into polar bears, if you want some up-to-date polar bear education, follow him on Twitter. He does a really great job educating people about polar bears. Okay, really quickly, the thing to keep in mind that we've talked about is that polar bears in the summer use a variety of different strategies to try and fight hunger that really must be impossible for us

to even understand what they're feeling. Think about just fasting for 150 days. That's what these animals are doing. It's got to be crazy the amount of hunger they're feeling if they're losing a kilogram. a day of weight. So the thing to, just the thing to remember is that they have different strategies and that can make their behavior really hard to predict in the summer. Some are going to be really slow and just kind of lay around and some are actively looking for new food sources, which is hard to then predict what that food source might be. So Matt had seen his fair share

of black bears in and around Maine, but he had never seen the other two North American bears. He'd never seen a grizzly. He'd never seen a polar bear. But he's aware that they're very different animals from his black bears that he had seen, and he knew that camping around polar bears was something not to be taken lightly. Something I want you guys to remember, too, for this story is that image of a polar bear breaking through a seal den, like getting up on its hind legs and breaking down through the ice. It's something that's going to come into play a little bit later. Whoa. Okay. So again, he's a big fan of the Sierra Club. He's confident that he's going to be in good hands on the expedition, so he decides to sign up. He wasn't an immediate,

approved because he didn't have a lot of experience backpacking. He was an avid outdoorsman, but he really hadn't done a ton of backpacking. So he spent the rest of the winter and the spring walking trails around Maine and kind of the northeast there in the woods with a heavy backpack and even sent photos of him with his backpack on top of some of the highest peaks in the area to the trip leaders. And when they saw those photos, they were like, fine, you can come. And he felt ready. So he was approved.

and they left in late July to start the adventure. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts,

we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock. dot com slash special offer terms apply all right in late july of 2013 the sierra club meets in montreal then they fly to a tiny coastal village in northern quebec and then a base camp ran by outfitters and the outfitters arranged for a floatplane to fly the group up over the torn gat mountains and down to the coast where they're going to make their first camp rich gross was one of the tour leaders and from what i can understand this was his first time and the

first time that the other tour leader, Marta, were going to be in the area, and it was also their first time being around polar bears. They'd been told that they would be lucky to see polar bears, but they should definitely take precautions while hiking and camping in the area because they would be in polar bear habitat. So Parks Canada had given Rich and Marta a briefing on polar bear safety. They passed that information onto their guests, and they'd brought electric fences, flare guns, and bear spray as their deterrence for polar bears. Everyone was educated how to use all properly, everyone in the group was nervously hoping for a polar bear sighting at a distance. I will just say, having been around polar bears, knowing what they're capable of,

I don't think I would ever go on a trip with someone that isn't comfortable around them already. So if you are ever planning on like going to the Arctic on a guided tour where you're going to be camping or walking or hiking, make sure you have someone in your group that has been around polar bears and kind of knows what they're doing around polar bears. Okay. They settle into their first camp right on the coast of this Labrador wilderness. They installed the electric fence, and they'd been warned by Parks Canada that the fence,

or no, by this outfitter, that the fence would blow them out of their boots if they touched it. So no one's really willing to, like, test the fence and make sure it's working. Which makes sense. If someone told me that, I don't. We tested all our fences. We did. Me and Jeff set them up as part of our Black Bear project,

and we would test them. And Jeff, did they always work? No. No. I mean, I would say like more often than not, we couldn't get a very good charge out of our fence. And there's a big reason for that. These fences are really dependent on the type of substrate that you set them in. So the moisture content of the soil, there's so many different things that can affect how well they work.

And the energizer that you're using to power them. And these fences that they were setting up used to just like D batteries, which I don't think I would really trust to repel a polar bear. And, you know, I don't know if, like, if this whole thing of them, like, not touching it because they're getting blown out of their boots was just an anecdote that Matt was telling or if someone actually tested the fence. But if you're going camping in polar bear country especially, you should bring a volt meter or something that you can use to test the fence and make sure it's operating.

Because you're going to be putting a lot of your safety on that fence working well. So you definitely want to make sure you have a good one. Polar bears don't wear boots either, so I don't know what the point of that would be. Can't blow it out of its boots. Yeah. So I would just say the other thing, too, is, well, you know, we'll get to this. We're not going to get into it yet. So after setting up the fence, the group goes to sleep, and early in the morning of July 23rd,

one of the participants gets up, goes away from the tents to pee, and they spot a skinny female polar bear with the cub from that year. The bear family's walking along the shore, and this year, a club participants excitedly wake up and everyone goes outside and they watch these two bears, which are about 400 yards away from their campsite. If that's me, if I come out of my tent and I see a polar bear 400 yards away, I'm starting to get pretty nervous. I'm starting to think we're too close to the coast. We're too close to a place where polar bears are actively moving back and forth. And bears this time of year, if they are actively feeding, if they're

actively looking for food, the place they're going to be getting it from is most likely going to be the ocean. So they are going to be traveling back and forth along the coast. Everyone's pretty excited that they got to see this bear on their first morning in Torrogat, and they're all pretty pumped when they get ready for a day hike in the surrounding hills and mountains. And Matt talks a lot in his interviews about just how beautiful the area was and how, like, waking up to another polar bear and cub and then spending the day hiking around in one of the most scenic places on earth was just really dreamy and perfect. But as they get close to their camp, it does.

It sounds like the kind of day. Cool, Jeff. Any of the three of us. I would want to see a polar bear if I'm going to some place with no roads. Oh, totally, for sure. High up in Alaska, you know? Totally. I just wouldn't want to see one as I come out of my tent.

I don't want them anywhere near my campsite. And that's someone who's like, I'm very aware of a polar bear behavior. I know what to do around him. I don't want them anywhere near my campsite. I really don't. This is an animal. Well, how would you want to see them if you're them? I want to hike a couple miles from my campsite and see one on the other side.

Or you know what? I want to camp in the interior of this place and hike to the coast and see them on the coast. I see. You're just nervous that they're kind of like knowing where your campsite is now. Yeah, and they can see it and it's an attraction for them. So you don't want to be in the polar bear highway. You want to walk to the polar bear highway. Like when I see a Ferris wheel, I'm like, okay, I guess I'm going there now.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like a, this guy is a Farras wheel magnet. Yeah. All right. Okay. So as they get closer to their camp on their return from this day hike, the day gets a bit

scarier. So they had to remove their boots to cross a small stream. And as they're taking their boots off, Matt looks up to see a very large polar bear on its own. It's much bigger than the skinny feme. they had seen that morning. It's sitting not far away and it's looking directly at the group. The bear's too close for comfort, so the group did what they'd been instructed to do. They grouped up, they made a lot of noise, and they tried to convince this bear to leave. When the bear didn't leave, Rich, the tour leader, fires a flare at the bear.

It does the trick and the bear runs off. But they all watch it run and they see it run and it runs up on top of a ridge and then stops about a half a mile away. So as they walk the rest of the distance back down to their camp, they can see this bear sitting up on the ridge, and it stays there the entire afternoon. It's just watching them. So Matt's particularly nervous, and as he's sitting up late at night by the fire,

he's looking up there, and he can see the bear is still there, and it's still watching them. But Matt finally decides he's just going to go to bed. You know, he is really relying on the fact that they have this electric fence, and they have the flares and everything, and he's, I think, really trusting in this organization and just thinking, I'm safe, we've taken all the precautions, I'm going to go to bed. So he does.

And then he gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and when he goes outside, he sees the bear's no longer there, he feels a lot better, and he goes back into his tent. Not long after a storm blows in, and Matt falls asleep to the sound of the rain and the sleet hitting his tent. He's sleeping on his back, so he starts to snore, and this loud snoring gives the polar bear, which had broken through the electric fence

and was standing outside the ring of tents, something to key in on. This bears no stranger to quickly killing prey, even prey that it can only smell or hear and not see, like we talked about those seal dens. Mike would be in trouble. Because he snores. He snoring a lot.

Oh, don't even try and put that on you, Jeff. Unreal. Do they, what about like squeaking your teeth together would that bring them in anything? Oh, they could probably hear that, right? Yeah. I don't, they'd probably be intimidated by that. I don't want to start a myth that polar bears are attracted to snoring or something like that.

But I do think if the camp's completely quiet and one person is snoring really loud, it might be a curiosity to the bear. It might sound like, oh, there's an animal in that tent. I'm going to go investigate it. So again, out on the sea ice, when this huge predator detected a seal pup in its layer, it would stand to its full height and bring all of its weight down on the ice, smashing through the crust, grabbing the shock seal pup. But the bear wasn't standing over a seal layer at the moment. It's standing over a small tent.

And the sounds and smells coming from inside the tent are foreign, but still enticing. Some more investigation would be ideal, but too much could potentially cause prey to escape. And feeding opportunities are scarce for this bear. So the bear did what came naturally. It rises to its full height, and then quickly it brings over a thousand pounds of weight down onto Matt Dyer's tent where he had just been sleeping soundly inside. Around 2.30 a.m., something outside had woken up Matt. He's on his back and he looked up at the wall of his tent to see two big long shadows extending across it. His brain had a split second to

process the information and Matt realized he was looking at the shadows of two huge bear legs when suddenly his world comes crashing down around him. Bear legs. The bear. He's sexy. arms isn't it it's arms it's its legs because it was standing up straight and about to come down on his tent like it was standing on oh i got you yeah i bet you that knock his boot off his boots off both of them yeah at least i just touch the fence yeah uh-huh yeah i guess if it's not too shocking maybe only one of your boots will pop off and then they're like we gotta turn up this fence this is a one-been fence this is a one-thead fence So this bear is now convinced by the struggling animal beneath it that it's found some food. So it lashes out with its massive paws and its sharp curved claws and those dig into Matt's sleeping bag and his flesh. Then the bear figures out where Matt's head was and it pulls him in close and tries to rip him through the sidewall of his tent with its jaws. Reflexively, Matt puts his hands up to cover his face and head. And as he does this, the polar bear repeatedly bites through his hands to try to get.

get into his skull. His teeth are literally piercing through his hands, severing tendons, ripping away muscle and flesh, and leaving puncture wounds that were big enough Matt could have looked through them. And I believe that because I've seen polar bear canines are absolutely massive and they would leave really big holes in your hands. It's biting him through the tent too, right? Yeah, through the tent.

And it's getting through his hands and into his skull. But this bear had fought prey much larger, much more prepared than Linky, Matt and his struggle to protect himself is completely in vain. After a few seconds, the bear is able to latch onto his head, and it's holding his head in its jaws, it rips him through the sidewall of the tent and out onto the wet rocks. He described it like a cork being shot out of a champagne bottle is how he came out of his tent. So I picture like the bear like grabbing him and ripping him and throwing him, which is essentially

what it did. And then when he talks about how himself in the eye with him. The bear? Yeah, the bear hits himself in the eye with the cork. Oh, got it. I was lost there for a second. So I'm going to show you guys, and I'll describe it for listeners. Essentially, the upper part of this bear's jaws were on his left temple, and the lower part of its jaws were on his right jaw.

So it was kind of like this. And he talks about how lucky that was, because had the bear been just like a little bit different, it would have gotten his eyes and his nose or something like. that. But because of where it was, it didn't get like the really kind of important parts of your face. Yeah. I bet he was thinking he was really lucky in that moment. I'm so lucky. He's like, I'm so glad it's not like this. Yeah. And it's also, it is like this. So the bear slammed him into the rock so hard that he felt the air go out of his lungs, his lungs. And what he didn't know was that one of his lungs actually collapsed from this really hard, sharp impact on the rock. And then suddenly he's back in the bear's jaws and the bear's running.

It's dragging him across the rock. It's still holding his head in his jaws. At one point, hears his jawbone snap under the pressure of the polar bear jaws. And he can smell its rancid breath. And while all this is happening, a voice comes to him that says, you know, you're about to die. And his internal monologue answered back and said, yeah, I know. Wow.

He's looking out and all he can see is the creamy white fur of the polar bear on its abdomen. So while this bear's holding him, its head is kind of down and his face is just pointing at its chest and its abdomen. So the bear's running and all he can see is like fur in his eyesight. And he can smell this. If his internal monologue was like, you're probably wondering how you got here. Record scratch. Matt can smell this really rancid dead fish smell. He knows what's happening.

And he clearly thinks this bear's probably taking him to the water to kill him. And he starts thinking of his wife and his dad. And he just kind of is accepted that he's going to die. This fact was pretty much confirmed when he's dragged further from camp and he starts hearing and feeling bones in his skull and his neck crack and pop. Which aren't places where you want to hear bones start cracking. And he knows that any minute, he's just expecting any minute for his whole world just to turn black. And in one of the interviews, he actually talks about how lucky it is that he, like, that our bodies are designed to a way where you just don't feel pain and that kind of stuff. Because he felt nothing.

He just felt pressure. And his body was protecting him from feeling all the pain. That's insane. So at any minute, he's expecting his world to turn black, but it doesn't turn black. I guess we can't give him very many ouchies. it doesn't hurt It's a good point Just wait

Zero All right At any minute He's expecting his world To turn black But it doesn't turn black It turns reddish orange The light from a flare

Lights up the area Around Matt and Bear And suddenly he's Yeah he's in The fire in Brimstone He's like oh you're going to hell He's like oh it's hot all of a sudden So the light from a flare

lights up his world. Suddenly he's alone on the cold wet grass and rocks. The bear had dropped him, but he could hear it nearby, and he could hear that it was coming back to him and approaching him again. But then another flare again erupts into the sky and the bear once again leaves. Matt tries to get up, but he can't move, and he realized he's also covered in this like goo, like a clear goo, and he realizes that's just bear saliva. He's got bear saliva all over him. He can't move. and he's silently just praying to himself the bear won't return and then he starts to hear the shouts and the yells

of his trip companions coming to his rescue. So when this attack started, Rich Gross, the trip leader, one of the trip leaders, he had been sleeping and that entire day he had just been visualizing what he was going to do if they ran into any problems

and one of the visualizations that he was running through was a polar bear attack. So when he went to sleep, he put his boot right outside the door of his tent and he put the cocked and loaded flare gun right into his boot. Luckily, it wasn't blown off by that. Interesting.

So when this attack happens, Matt starts screaming, Marta starts screaming for help, and that wakes rich up. He runs out of his tent in his long underwear. He grabs the flare gun, and he aims at the bear. He sees that there's this destroyed electric fence, the bear's dragging Matt a few dozen yards away from where they're standing, everyone's out of their tent screaming and over that he points at the bear he aims the flare gun and he fires

again you know we know this already the first flare causes the bear to drop mat these flare guns make a loud report when they hit the end of their path so it's not only like a screaming ball of fire coming at this bear but it's also making noise and that was more than enough for this bear to drop mat and then when it starts to think maybe i'll go back and try and grab him again he shoots another one one, which is the right thing to do. Nice. That was enough to really cement for this bear that it had bit off more than it could chew. It would be scary if you're a bear.

It's just like, is that a ball of fire screaming at me? Yeah. They might think it's aliens for all they know. When I would haze bears in Yellowstone, sometimes we'd use cracker shells, which at night do like a bright kind of fireworks thing, and then they all make a loud noise too. And bears hate them. Like that is just something they want nothing to do with.

They don't like the loud flash or the loud bang and the bright flash. It's just not, there's nothing in their world that does that. So it's not a good thing for them. So Rich knows that they have to get down to Matt fast before the bear comes back or before Matt dies. So he grabs another tour participant and they run down to Matt's body. And two people actually weren't enough to drag him back up to the tents. So they get two more people.

They grab Matt and they drag him back up into one of the tents. Matt, who had pretty much given up all hope of survival, is shocked to suddenly find himself back in relative safety, but he's still pretty far from safe. He couldn't move. He's losing blood, and they're hundreds of miles away from any kind of civilization. So they quickly break into smaller groups.

One of the groups is dedicated to keeping Matt comfortable, and there's actually a doctor that's in that group. Oh, wow. He was like treating Matt's wounds and taking care of him. Clutch. And then the other group is working on looking for the bear, and making sure it doesn't come back to camp. This episode is brought to you by Netflix.

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Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center Time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. All right. So Marta gets on the satellite phone and she starts calling for help. She's the other trip leader. It's the middle of the night.

So finding people that were awake and people that had a helicopter that could come rescue them in Torn Gat was really difficult. And they finally find someone at 6 a.m., which was roughly four hours after this attacked place. Oh, wow. But in some of these articles that I read or interviews that I listened to, Rich, the other tour leader talks about just how great this group was. No one's panicking. They have a doctor. Everyone's tending to Matt and they have polar bear watchers with two flare guns. So around 8.30 in the morning,

the helicopter finally arrives, which is about seven hours after Matt had been attacked. He's loaded up into this helicopter with a medic and the doctor goes with them too. And then a bear guard with a rifle gets out and stays with the rest of the people. They had to wait an extra like 12 hours for a fishing boat that shows up to take them out and back to civilization. That's crazy, man. Matt then wakes up at a hospital in Montreal, and he sees his wife sitting there in his hospital room, relief washes over him, and he starts to cry. The bear had inflicted some very serious injuries that...

I would have been crying a lot earlier. Not me. The bear inflicted some very serious injuries that doctors and surgeons had done their best to fit. Me who just watched Coco on a plane and didn't get a drink order because I was crying when they asked me what I wanted to drink. And I just went, no. That's a tearjerker that movie. That's a good one. Yeah, he got me right at the grandma part, too.

He had large open puncture wounds in his hands, long open gashes on his head from the teeth, and some of those wounds had already started to get infected. He had several cracked vertebra in his neck. a cracked jawbone, and a severed carotid artery. I got it right this time, pronunciation. I think I did at least. My guess is that the artery had been pinched closed. Sometimes when they're severed, the force of that will actually kind of pinch the artery closed.

Otherwise, I don't know how he would have survived waiting that long for rescue with the severed artery. knew how to like stop the bleeding with it a bit. Yeah. Yeah, the doctor did remark that there was remarkably little bleeding for how much he had injured. And all the puncture wounds, yeah. So he just got like super crushed. Yeah. And then he had a collapsed lung, a lot of puncture wounds, and a shredded larynx that would make it impossible to speak for a few weeks.

And even today, I listened to some interviews with them in the out of live interview. His voice is really raspy and it kind of sounds like there's some feedback, like a bit of radio static when he talks. Some of the sources I read, including the Sierra Club One, they have some really great little anecdotes about him meeting back up with Rich and some of the other people that saved his life. He went on some other hikes with them. That was good. One about him, he went back to Torngat and saw Polar Bears again. He's a tough guy.

This is like a really tough, cool person. I would say of our people that we've talked about, he's definitely very high on the likability scale. I really like Matt. I was wondering if Rich was going to be like, I knew we shouldn't have taken this guy, you know. I had a bad feeling about him. I had a bad feeling.

I knew he couldn't handle it. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what happened here. We talked about this a little bit already, but we're going to talk about the motivations of this bear. Like we said, this bear was probably in the middle of its fasting period and much more likely to investigate alternative sources of food than it otherwise would be. So bright tents, commotion in camp,

the scents coming out of camp, that's going to be a big attractant to a bear, especially one that's maybe a younger male for a bear that hasn't really figured out. to avoid humans at that point. I'm guessing this was either a male or a younger male bear. Okay, and then we're going to talk a little bit about these people's preparation for camping in polar bear country.

We'll start with the good things. They had bear spray. They had an electric fence. They had flares. And one of those things saved Matt's life. The flare, without a doubt, saved Matt's life. If they had not have fired those flares, had Rich not fired those flares, Matt's dead. I feel very confident saying that.

Now, some of the things they didn't have, they didn't have a way to test their electric fence. Had they been able to test it and realize that maybe it wasn't putting out enough voltage, that could have saved Matt a lot of pain, recovery, and trauma. And then another thing they didn't have that I would always have in polar bear country is some kind of armed bear guard. To me, it sounded like they all went to sleep at the same time, and you should have someone, you should have rotating shifts of people that are staying up looking for bears at night. That's just something

you need to do in Poli Bear Country. You said the fence had two D batteries? Yeah, it was just like powered by D batteries. So like two of these batteries on your face? It's a strange. What about? Yeah.

What about that? You got me. Got them, dude. All right. Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit about those things but a big thing for them is that they camped in the wrong place too. Polar bears on land like to stay near the coast. Even the ones that are just waiting and kind of doing the walking hibernation, they tend to stay near the coast.

And so the further you get from the coast, the less chance you have of running into a polar bear. So what I would have done in this situation, I would have camped way inland, and then if they really want to see polar bears, you take a few days to hike to the coast and look for polar bears. That's the safest way to do this. Then the other thing we talked about, they should test the fence.

From everything I read, it seems like this group was really relying on this fence. Like they thought the fence is what was going to protect them so much that they didn't have bear guards. And if I had seen a bear 400 yards away from my tent, I 100% want to know that that fence is working. And I want to know that it's putting out some serious voltage. And then I'm also going to want someone armed and watching for a bear at night. So I personally, and again, I feel for most people I'm going to be pretty comfortable around polar bears, I wouldn't camp in polar bear country without those things. If someone tomorrow said, hey, I'm going to give you a free trip to Torn Gat in the summer, but we're not going to have a way to test our fence and we're not going to have bear guards, I wouldn't do it. I really wouldn't.

And I'm not just saying that. Like, I truly just would say no. A quick reminder on these electric fences, they are not strong enough to stop a determined bear. They work because they're surprising enough to deter a curious bear, but if you have a bear that's like enraged or really determined, it's going to go through that fence like it's nothing. Even one that's fully charged and working, it's not going to stop it.

You don't want to rely on this product to save your life. You want to rely on it as an extra level of deterrent, but this isn't something that's like a surefire going to stop any bear because it's not. We're almost to the end of this part, but just another reminder, this kind of preparation, if you're going to a place that has polar bears or grizzly bears or anything preparing and doing that extra work, isn't just good for us. It's really good for bears. Because luckily in this story, they didn't go kill this bear because everyone realized this was a bear behaving naturally and they were in a wilderness.

But often when we tell these stories, the thing that happens to the bears is the bear also gets killed. And that's really common with polar bears because they're often killed by people that are guarding with rifles or whatever. So it's really important that you're prepared. It's really important that you take these kind of precautions, not for your own safety, but also for the bears' safety. All right, any questions? So pretty much you're saying the main mistake was that they were camping where the bears already are, like, moving and have habitat.

And it's like you're putting yourself, like, way too close to where you know they're going to be walking and, like, around. Yeah, I think, like, a good comparison. would be if you're in grizzly country or a coastal grizzly country and you set up your camp 400 yards from a salmon stream as compared to like an alpine meadow that's a mile away you still have a good chance of seeing bears in that alpine meadow but not nearly the chance you have is by that salmon stream so that's the main thing and then also bear guards you just need having a bear guard in polar bear country the really good thing about these kind of polar bear attacks is you can see the bear coming from a long

distance because you're in really open country. So Bear Guard can be really effective because they'll see the bear at like, you know, a quarter or half mile away. And there's plenty of time to get everyone mobilized, plenty of time to start shooting flares. So they can be extremely effective as well. Right. Mike, you got any questions? Nope.

You did a great job, Wes. All right. Ouchies? Well, yeah, actually, that was a question I had. So when he was waiting for help, did it ever start to hurt? He doesn't talk about it. In any of the interviews I could find, he really doesn't talk about pain at all. So I'm going to say six ouches for me, even though he got like attacked by a polar bear.

Yeah. And he had like cracked vertebrae and a cracked jaw. His recovery was long. He talks about having to use like a little makeshift Ouija board to communicate with people. He might have called some demons in the meantime. Maybe that's why he went to hell. Right. You open that portal already.

sure. So his recovery was long and I do think he still has some physical limitations from this. So I think six is too low. I'm going to say seven. Yeah, I'll go with a nine because he's he's like really into Nordic stuff and those guys act. They act so tough. So like the only reason it's not 10 is he cried. I think I follow your logic. But yeah, I guess. I'm going to have to draw this out for myself after. So, like, even if he is, I think he was in a lot of pain, but, like, he didn't want to admit it. Sure. Yeah.

I'm going to go with an eight because it seems like there's been some lasting physical repercussions from the attack. Long recovery. It's really cold. You know, when you're, like, you're really cold and you slice your finger on a rock or something, it hurts extra bad? He was, like, thrown onto a pile of rocks by the polar bear. That's going to hurt a lot. Yeah, his lung. Yeah, his lung.

He's cold. His lung, yeah, his lung was cold probably, so that hurt extra bad. So, eight. I'm going to bump up to eight, too. I'll go down to eight. I don't like my, I was doing the explanation and I didn't like it. I'll go down to seven even. Oh, wow.

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I've noticed I need more nutrient support than I used to, especially when I travel, spend time with my kids. Yeah. It's a classic Jeff reading copy mistake. Do a tough workout. I haven't met. Or have a long day. Yeah, I got a couple kids. Stephen, he's three.

He's worried about global warming and his future. He doesn't think polar bears are going to be around his whole life. But I know if I drink it daily, I'm going to feel an extra boost. And that's coming off script. I know that I'm going to feel more energetic when I take AG1. So if there's one product, I had to recommend to elevate your health, it's AG1. and that's why we've partnered with them for so long. So if you want to take ownership of your health, start with AG1.

Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D. That's great in these winter months. And it's vitamin D3 plus K2 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Exclusively at drinkag1.com slash tooth, tooth, tooth all caps. That's drinkag1.com slash tooth. Check it out. All right, we're going to get into our categories. So we've done polar bears.

So we're going to do your favorite movie scene involving flares aside from the Jurassic Park T-Rex scene, which I am sure all three of us would have picked. It's kind of a controversial scene for us, but yeah, go for it. Okay. Why is that a controversial scene? You guys think he would have gone back in its enclosure, the T-Rex, and I think that they needed Dr. Malcolm to do a flare

to keep it going. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. So Sam Neal throws his flare back into the enclosure. The T-Rex is actively going back after it into the enclosure. But then Malcolm lights another one, distracts it back towards the people. Bad move, Malcolm. I think he saved him.

Bad move. Yeah. Agree to disagree. Okay. My answers to this question, I have two. I'm going to say the dissent, the, I believe it's Neil Marshall that directed it, There's a scene in the descent where one of the women that are stuck in the cave lights a flare. And just as the flare is sputtering out, you see one of the creatures behind her.

That's a great classic horror movie scene. Love an animal lit by a flare. It's great. And then my second answer is just any fighter plane that shoots out flares to distract missiles. Not a big military movie guy, but boy, do I love when they shoot all those little flares out. Top Gun Maverick had a few good ones of that. Yeah, it's great. All right.

I'll go. I think I'm going to go with the thing, like where they lay flares out all over, and it just, like, makes a really cool setting. I also thought of Apocalypse now, but I think that's more smoke, that scene where, like, all the bombs are going off next to that sergeant. And another one that I want to shout out is Kong Skull Island, like the Samuel Jackson King Kong. I never even saw it, but in the preview, there's a really cool flare scene that I was like,

that looks cool. And then it didn't get good ratings. I didn't see it. As a Kong head, you got to see that one. It's okay. It's pretty good. I liked it. There's a great scene in that, the one where the guy, like, pulls all the pins on his jacket

to, like, the grenades, and then he's, like, wanting the monster to eat him. And then it just hits him with his tail and he blows up against the side of the mountain. Is that in Kong? Skull Island? Yeah. Okay, I've seen it then. I've seen that. Yeah, I think we went and saw it together. Yeah. I was going to pick the thing. That was my first choice, but I have a couple

backups. So, the recent The Batman movie at the very end when he's like saving all the people in the flooded city center, which is really symbolic of like him realizing he needs to do more than just make the bad guys fear him, but also inspire hope and the good guys.

I thought that was really just an awesome ending to a Batman movie. And then, uh, can I say something controversial really quick? Yeah, go for it. I think that's my favorite Batman movie. It might be mine too. Yeah, I think it's so good. I just rewatch Dark Night with Jesse, and I think I like the new, the Matt Reeves one more.

Okay. I said it. I'm not, you said it. Thanks for saying. Catwoman in that one is like the coolest character ever. Zilly rabbits. Perfect. My backup, backup is, oh, another classic guys.

The Rock, at the end of the rock, Nick Cage, he's got the flare on Alcatraz to call off like the missile strike or whatever. Oh, dude, that movie, that's a 10 out of 10 movie, I think. I need to rewatch that. It's been a while. It's so fun. Kylo Ren's like lightsaber and the snow seems like a flare, but it's not really, but that scene was sweet. Yeah. I was trying to think a few movies where people get like shot with a flare.

Right. And I couldn't think of any. I can't think of them either. I tried real hard, but yeah. All right, my next category is your favorite thing you watched on one of our planes while we were in Australia. We took quite a few flights. What's your favorite thing you watched on a plane in Australia? Mine was across the Spider-Verse, the second of the Spider-Verse movies.

The first time I watched it, I liked it a lot, but I think I was just too annoyed with multiverse-type stuff. but the second time I just fully appreciated it and was completely engulfed. Yeah. Okay. Mike? You can be or played. I know. I know what you're trying to get me to say.

And that was real close. So I've been playing the Ace Attorney games. I've been going through, I think Justice for All is the name of the second game, which I'm on. I'm almost done with it. It's been great. But I'm picking the Maltese Falcon. And I just, I'm a big Humphrey Bogart fan.

I think he's just like old school. cool to the finest and had a great time. Real film noir type stuff going on. I lost to Mike in the walkabout mini golf. I lost to both of you, but I got last and Mike won. So he got to pick one of my movies and he picked Clueless and I had a good time with it. It's a great movie. It's a very generous pick.

A virgin who can't drive. That is a good line. I miss Brittany Murphy. She was a childhood crush. Her husband kind of killed her. A quick thing I wanted to bring up was a quick correction corner. If Britney Murphy's husband was one of my clients and ace attorney, I would have gotten them off. Just saying, I was good at getting people off murder.

Mike, I'm real good at it in his anime attorney game. Oh, yeah. We were just sitting on the plane and Mike's like, I've gotten like 19 people off from murder. And we're like, huh? And then we just see that he's playing a game where he's like, plays an anime attorney that just gets people off for murder and stuff. And like, it was great. I was watching in like every 20 seconds, it just goes like bright pink the whole screen and says, hold on. Hold up.

Objection. Hold it. Oh, guys. It's so hype. I love it. All right. Back to my correction. The Wolverine episode, I cast some doubt on whether or not it actually happened.

And we had a listener, Jennifer, reached out to us and said that the man in the story, Jack, was her uncle. And that he was very large, very tough. He, like, fought in Pearl Harbor and survived that. His wife died. He had five kids under 12, and he survived that. He just seems like a real character. And that this thing with the Wolverine actually did happen. And he had the scars to prove it.

And he was, like, humble enough and cool enough that he never called it a Wolverine attack. He just said they surprised each other in a really small space. Nobody was looking for trouble. It was just an unfortunate circumstance. So pretty much how we explained it, but we cast some doubt on whether or not it actually even happened. So I'm really happy that Jennifer reached out and told us that it did. So we're going to go ahead and put our stamp on that one and say it happened. We're going to trust the man. Love Jack. Yep. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you Jack. All right. We're going to pull up an old category that we haven't done in a while, a truth and a lie. So Jeff and Mike have prepared two questions, one of them, or two animal facts.

One is true and one is a lie. And I have to do my best to say which is which. Which one did you pick, Jeff? I picked a lie. I was just looking at my phone again to see. Okay. So you probably, you probably picked truth. Well, last time I think I messed up.

Yeah. That's right. We'll do truth. If you're doing lie, I'll do truth. We went on a hiatus after a couple of botched attempts. Yeah. But it's back. We'll see if we can get right at this time. I'll go first.

So, frogs, when they're trying to jump their highest, can jump up to two feet or 24 inches. Just frogs? Any frog? Okay. All right. Dolphins can talk and understand each other over the phone. It's a hard one Because I don't think Jeff's is

Jeff's wasn't Like I believe that a frog Might be able to jump two feet I don't know if he didn't say that's their max height Did you say that's their max height Jeff Or they can jump two feet Like of all frogs Like the highest frog can jump is two feet

Okay And Mike says dolphins can talk over the phone Um I'm gonna say Jeff's is a lie And Mike's is true Oh damn You're so smart, dude. Man.

Yeah, I've seen you jump higher than two feet. Oh, no, it's wrong. If you Google how high a frog can jump, it's 16 inches. Any frog. I just said, how high can a frog jump? Great. Glad we brought this back. All right, we're resurrecting another old category, which is TikTok Trash Talk.

So when you get on TikTok and you put in polar bear attack, a lot of trash comes up. One of the ones that was most viewed is a guy saying like, what do you do in a polar bear attack? And he pretty much just says, you just die. It's going to kill you. It's a killing machine. There's nothing you can do. You roll over and you die. And there's always the stuff like the poem that people always recite is if it's black, fight back.

if it's brown, lay down, if it's white, good night, which only the black bear part of that is good advice. The rest of that's pretty bad advice. That's not the case. This isn't an animal that you have nothing you can do against. So there is a small kernel of truth behind this reputation, and that's that this is a food-motivated animal. If it attacks you, it's probably not because it's angry or surprised or territorial.

It's probably trying to eat you. If you get attacked by a polar bear, there's a really high chance it's a predatory attack. But they are still very, very, very rare. And even when you adjust for a population of people that live in polar bear habitat, they're still rare. They're still not likely compared to other bears even. We don't fit their prey profile.

We're an unknown risk to them that they want to avoid. And when they do decide to attack, it's almost always predatory. And it can be really hard to discourage them. And so for that reason, they've kind of earned this reputation. And for that reason, you have to take them really seriously. But really, like, those kind of myths don't need to be perpetuated. It is true that it's a predatory bear, that it can be very curious. So you need to be well prepared.

But it's not true that they're just, like, ravenous death monsters, that there's absolutely nothing you can do. So after shitting on people's stupid answers of what to do in a polar bear attack, we'll move on to our next category. What would Mike and Jeff do? All right. Nice. So I kind of want to, oh, and another thing on TikTok, that I, my favorite one is when people say that they're like walk with their hands over their nose so that you don't see the black spot of their nose and they just completely blend in with the snow.

Because I was like, oh, that's so cool. But I guess that's wrong. It's not true. I even on like, when I do my research, even on some like really good sources, they're, There's the myth trickles in that sometimes polar bears try and hide their nose when they're hunting. And that's why they have their head down and stuff. And there's been research on that. They don't do that.

That's not something they do. That's not like, seals aren't just going to notice their black nose and be like, oh, it's a polar bear. Like, that's not something that happens. They don't hide that. So for the, what would Mike and Jeff do? I'm going to actually do it based on how I would catch a seal if I was a polar bear. Okay. Okay, yeah.

So if I'm allowed to, like, do whatever, like, use my knowledge, I'm going to use a mirror and just inch closer to these holes with a mirror in front of me. So, like, because it's Arctic, so all it is is reflecting back the Arctic, you know? Yes. Yeah, like in, so I'm just pushing a mirror forward. With the projectors. And I'll just sneak forward with the mirror. And then, like, he's going to see another seal once I get too close.

but I don't think that'll scare him. You know, he'll see himself. Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. But if I can't use, like, human stuff, I think I'll get four holes where I can have, like, both my hands and my legs, like, next to a hole. So I'm waiting at four different holes at the same time with my claws.

Okay. That's smart. You know, you're going to rely on the seals for that a little bit. But, all right. Yeah. Or I can make my own hole and trick them into thinking it. theirs you know yeah sure that's great answer not what I expected at all uh Mike do you have an answer yeah so it sounded like it was really inconvenient that they had to wait so long for a

helicopter to show up and take Matt Dyer out of there so I'd just bring a helicopter that's good advice yep a D powered helicopter uh as a seal I would make like 10,000 holes that's good I guess yeah you might get tired scratching out 10,000 thousand holes. Well, I'm not getting eaten by a bear. Fair enough. All right.

So what you should actually do, we're going to talk specifically about camping and recreating in polar bear country. We talked about this a lot already, but be prepared. Bring multiple deterrence from multiple distances. So flares are really good at like 100 meters or closer. And the great thing about flares with polar bears, you don't really have to worry about starting a fire.

So when that bear gets within 100 meters, you can start shooting flares. And that's going to be a long-range deterrent. And then when it gets within 30 meters, you can use your bear spray. They're really scary. Those flares are scary to bears, and they're very effective. My master's advisor, Tom Smith, was just actually a co-author on a paper that was about how well bear spray works on polar bears.

There's some really interesting takeaways from that paper. They looked at 19 incidents where bear spray was used on curious or aggressive polar bears, and in 18 of those 19 incidents, it completely stopped the bear. They also looked at 54 different polar bear attacks where spray wasn't used, and they posited that spray would have stopped roughly 93% of those attacks. The paper's super interesting. It's called efficacy of bear spray as a deterrent against polar bears. We could probably spend a whole episode talking about it.

Tom also wrote a paper on how bear spray works in really cold conditions that was published in 2020. I helped a little bit with that paper, but I wasn't a co-author. Like it doesn't freeze? Yeah, he looked at like what conditions would cause it to work less effectively. And really high wind and really high temperatures can affect it, but not enough to where it like doesn't work in polar bear country. It just makes it a little bit less of a cloud. Like a tornado.

It doesn't. There's a tornado between you and the bear. It'd be hard to hit the bear with it. Yeah. Or maybe the tornado would carry it into the bear. Yeah. We should put that on bear spray packaging. Like, don't use it if there's a tornado or maybe do.

Do use it. That's what I would suggest. The flare seems like the most fun bear deterrent of all the bear deterrence to use. Yeah. One that's not fun that I would bring on a trip like this too is a they sell these little alarms, like a motion-activated alarm called a critter-gitter. And you can set that up outside your tent. and if something breaks the laser on that alarm,

it really makes a loud, aggressive noise. And that can scare off the animal and that it can also warn everyone that something's approaching. So in a place like this where there's not going to be many other animals approaching your campsite, I would definitely set up one of those

because it would be a great other deterrent to use. Okay, listener questions. Mike, you got any subscriber questions? I do. I got a couple. So the first one is from Alatini. They ask, I have a question that is tangentially related to the podcast. The band Animal Collective is my favorite group. Good pick. So my question is,

what is your top animal band slash artist? Doesn't need to necessarily be the word, just any reference to a real critter. So like band of horses is their offering. Yeah, what would mind be? I like horse the band to more than what's the black bear song, Wes? It's by the band Black Bear. And it's called Black Bear, I think. Yeah, that's my choice. That's your pick. That's a good one. Mine might be, so the band has to be titled? I guess the band's name. The name of the band, yeah. I mean, there are a couple obvious picks like the Beatles.

The Beatles. The Beepard. Death leopard is a good pick. Yeah, pour some sugar on me. I also came up with gorillas and modest mouse. Ooh, gorillas is a good pick. Dinosaur Jr. I like them a lot.

Yeah. If I'm answering it truthfully, it's the Beatles. But I really like your guerrillas answer. So I'm just going to agree with those. Okay. Next question, this is from Mary. If you guys could choose one city or state, whether it be because you hate it there, or you think it would be beneficial to the environment to be reclaimed by its original ecosystem,

which would it be? They would choose Florida for a variety of reasons. Wait, so like... To not have, like, human interference, you mean? Or what's it saying? Right. So it just basically nature reclaims it. Yeah, I would, I think California before people,

people like really went there was like garden of Eden type stuff like just gold everywhere grizzly bears like lots of water and rivers and stuff and we've dried it out killed all the grizzly bears took all the gold yeah uh i might go Washington dc I like that answer a lot and it's not because I feel strongly one way or the other in like partisanship I I don't I'm not smart enough or informed enough to like really speak to that but I feel like a reset could do us some good around those parts. I'm going to pick Florida too. I just feel like Florida has such incredible biodiversity,

and there's so much happening there that's kind of going against things that I, I don't know. I don't think it's really fair to pick any state aside from like the one that you live in, but I'd love to see a wild Florida, completely wild. So I'm going to pick Florida. Great. Plus it's America's wing, you know? Sure, yeah.

We got to let nature take that, take that. weighing back. Jeff, do you have Instagram questions we can go to? Yeah. Well. What am I waiting for? Whale.

Well, here we go. Alexandra M23. Would you rather be a migratory or non-migratory bird? I think migratory. Seymour? Yeah, it's a lot of work, but you get to like spend the winter in a warm place

and then the summer in a warm place. So I'd want to be one of the ones that migrates from like Montana down to South America. Not a lot of in-flight entertainment is the thing I'm most concerned with. It'd be pretty boring, I think. Probably. But I guess not a lot of entertainment going on wherever you live. Pretty boring. Yeah.

Would you want to be a cassowary? No, because then you don't want to be a bird and not be able to fly. If I'm a bird and I'm a flightless bird, no thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Do Falcons migrate, right? Some of them, yeah. Yeah, I'll do that.

Catherine Mariani asked, do bears get hit by cars? Odds of survival? Does it depend on the kind of bear? Yeah, they do get hit. They get hit quite a bit. When I worked in Yellowstone, probably close during my couple years there, there was probably a dozen bears that got hit by cars. And the thing that really, the thing that makes the difference is like how big of a car and how fast it's traveling. It's not so much the species of the bear as much as how fast the car is going. But like, yeah, a big grizzly is going to have a better chance than a tiny newborn black bear. But I would say the main thing is just how fast the car is going. So if you're driving in a place that has lots of bears, drive carefully, be careful because you definitely can kill them with your car.

How dangerous are they for like the driver? I mean, they can do a lot of damage to your car. They can come through the windshield or something. But it's not like you're going to get attacked by the bear or something, but it can, No, but like you can, okay. Evie Wald Gah asked, hi, Jeff, how's the stomach issues going post-surgery? Hope you're feeling better. I still have a lot of lower back pain, so that's what I was hoping to fix. And, you know, I'm going to a chiropractor a lot, and I think it's gotten somewhat better,

but I still, still bugs me. Diarya? Yeah. You know what I was thinking the whole time you were telling that story, West? is Matt Dyer. This is the first part of the word diarrhea, his last name. That's all I was thinking about. It's so cool.

All right, let's do one more. Sam Wysha. I wish my last name was Dyer. Which animal would you choose to have superpowers from? I think we've done this one because I always just say I just want to be a bird and be able to fly. I'll do sloth and just hold my poop for two weeks and then dump one third my body weight. I'm pretty sure that's what you have. answered last time too.

I'll go with an animal that can hold its breath for like days at a time. That's a better one for sure. And then I could be like David Blaine, he wouldn't. Yeah. Like what would he have left at that point? I can hold my breath. You could steal his career. Exactly. Yeah, you could do it like at the same time as him and like point at your watch when you know he's running out of there and just be like, I'm fine man.

All right. That's it for listener questions. I actually, I wanted to real quick just do a couple cage match rapid fires at you if that's okay Wes Polar Bear versus Walrus Like a big male Walrus and big male polar bear

If they're fighting to the death I'd put my money on the polar bear But it could go away Yeah That happens in the wild sometimes And both have died Oh really? What about a hippo?

Hippo. Hippo's taking polar bear. All right. And tiger, polar bear wins, right? Tiger versus polar bear? Like a big Siberian tiger and a big male polar bear?

I don't know. Because again, like, tigers are really good at killing things. So are polar bears, though. And they get so bad. I think that's another one where it goes both ways a few times. Okay. Interesting.

I probably, you know, the polar bear is so much bigger. I put my money on the polar bear. I put my money. I would. All right. That's all I got. Okay, I like it. Quick conservation corner.

I think in a future episode, we're going to go more into conservation on these guys. But the latest estimate on the global population of polar bears is there's about 26,000 polar bears. And that's actually something that climate deniers like to bring up a lot because we had less polar bears in like the 1970s. But it was because we were hunting them pretty aggressively throughout their range. And then we stopped hunting them. So their numbers rebounded. but the kind of the comparison or the thought like exercise that I like to use for this is like the Titanic was doing great until it hit the iceberg and that's kind of what we're seeing with polar bears is that yeah there are numbers have rebounded after we stopped hunting them but they're floating toward collapse because we're pushing them to the absolute limits of what they can survive and we are starting to see that already happen in some of the more vulnerable populations So the population I worked in, which is the southern Beaufort C subpopulation,

there's been a 40% drop in polar bear numbers in the last two decades. And then the other population I visited, Western Hudson Bay, they've had a 50% drop in numbers since 1980. And those are two of the southernmost populations of polar bears. And another thing that's happening to them is we're seeing worse body size in females, so they're not able to then bring cubs to term. They're not having as many cubs. cub litters of two or three used to be really common

and now like one or two is much more common and sometimes they don't even have cubs anymore because they just can't fast as long as we're forcing them to fast during the ice-free periods. So this is an animal that's in a lot of time. Took out the ice they were using? Hit the ice, broke up the ice.

It seemed like Billy Zane was having a bad time even before the iceberg, right? So he doesn't make a difference to him. Billy Zane doesn't give a shit. No. So really, like, their numbers are fine, but they are incredibly threatened as a species. There are places in the Arctic where there's going to be ice for the next hundred years or more probably, and those bears are probably going to be fine for quite a while.

But ultimately, if we keep going down the way that we're going with climate change, we will lose this as an animal, you know, probably not in our lifetimes, probably not in Jeff's kids' lifetimes, but sometime after that, you'll probably lose polar bear. If you need the ad read context to get that joke. But yeah. All right. Okay. We'll get deeper into it some other time.

But it is an animal that I have had sleepless nights thinking about polar bears. And they're very near and dear to me. So we might as well go into claws since I'm talking about it already. This is like a platinum 10 claw animal for me. I think they're one of the most majestic animals I've ever seen in the wild. I think they're culturally. significant. They are ecologically significant. They are beautiful and it breaks my heart to know that they do have this looming threat over them. So 10 out of 10 for me, 10 claws. I think this is the

close, if there were a bear to be a 10 claw animal for me, it would be a polar bear. They're my favorite. I think maybe seeing one will put it over the edge as if like my 10 claw rating matters in the grand scheme of things. They're awesome though. I think they're just so beautiful. and so big, and be ashamed of run out of polar bears, you know? So did it get a 10, or is it just close to 10? No, just barely under 9.9 claws. Okay. I'll say that them, like, jumping like a fox to kill seals,

I didn't know that, and that made me like them more. So I've been shuffling my top 10 around a lot. Let's put them in panda spot. Oh. So, yeah, they're like number eight now, and pandas move out of the top ten. Okay. Just because of that fact you shared. Okay.

But they're still my fourth favorite bear after grizzly, black bear, and koala bear. Right. Chihuahua's not a bear for all of this. Oh, so my third favorite. Yeah, there we go. All right. Thanks, everyone for listening. We really appreciate it.

Again, if you want more content, we've got our subscription channels. We do a free episode and then a subscription episode every other week. We've been doing that since we started with our subscription episodes. So there's a lot of content out there. Jeff just did a really fun episode on Gaboon Vipers. Mike did a really good one on, what was it, your last one? Oh, Triggerfish. Triggerfish.

Oh, yeah. Sidney was there. Mike did a really fun. Mike did a really fun episode on Triggerfish that my mom joined us for. Yeah. All the comments were just like, we love Cindy episodes. We love Cindy. People love our mom. Yeah, so check it out. It's 10 bucks a month. That price isn't changing. So you get a lot of extra content for a measly 10 schmeckles. All right. Sign up for a month. Then cancel. Pro move. Pro tip. If you don't like it. That's what I would do. You can get a free trial. Use rocket money. Yeah. All right. We'll see you guys. Bye

Love you. Love you.