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A Canadian researcher has logged a scientific first of witnessing a polar bear holding his breath for a record-breaking three minutes.

During an expedition off Norway’s Svalbard Islands, biologist Ian Stirling saw an emaciated bear staying underwater for three minutes, 10 seconds as he tried to sneak up on a group of bearded seals on an ice floe.

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“The bear was in bad condition, very skinny, and was of course very desperate for food,” Rinie van Meurs, Stirling’s Dutch co-author, said in an email.

Their paper, Longest recorded underwater dive by a polar bear, is published in the August edition of Polar Biology.

The bear was in bad condition, very skinny, and was of course very desperate for food

Ice is intrinsic to how polar bears hunt, but as summertime ice cover continues to disappear, they have been forced to find food by other means.

Increasingly, polar bears have been recorded moving onto land to feast on snow geese and caribou. Given their extraordinary capability to spend extended periods underwater, they have likely been resorting to deeper and longer dives.