Bears in the Woods

I was watching episode three of the third series of Lost last night and it rekindled some of my anxieties about the colour of polar bears.

I remember reading a book years ago by John Barrow which explained that polar bears are not really white, at least not any more than the sky is really blue. They have black skin and transparent fur which reflects white light. At the time I thought to myself that they still look kind of white in the dark though!

Anyway, in Lost last night these tropical polar bears were charging around the jungle leaving little tufts of white fur caught on the low-level foliage. Do polar bears molt like cheap Chinese-made teddies? Would the fur they shed really look so bright and white?

These bears look seriously pissed off with their new habitat. And what is it with elephants and sting-rays these days? They seem to have joined the Islamic armed resistance.