Shocking moment polar bear attacks woman who climbed into zoo enclosure

This is the terrifying moment a woman was attacked by a polar bear after jumping into its zoo enclosure.

The 32-year-old leapt over bars at Berlin Zoo during the bears' feeding time yesterday.

Despite six zookeepers' efforts to distract the four predators kept in the enclosure, the woman was bitten several times on her arms and legs.

The brave keepers eventually managed to push the bear away and pull the woman to safety.

She was bitten by one of the four older polar bears in the enclosure and not by the famous Knut, who took Germany by storm as a cub after he was hand-raised by a keeper.

It is not known why the woman pulled the dangerous stunt but she initially appeared to be elated as she swam towards a bear in the enclosure.

It is not easy to access the enclosure, which is surrounded by a fence, a line of prickly hedges and a wall.

Heiner Kloes, a zoo spokesman, said keepers pushed the huge bear away before pulling the woman out.

She was taken to a hospital for treatment where she is now recovering after undergoing surgery to heal her wounds.

The Top 3 Eco-Friendly Bug Awards

Nature is teaming with busy environmentalists, and nowhere more resourcefully so than in the diminutive world of invertebrates. As if their tootsies weren’t small enough, many of these little folks make it their life’s work to reduce their carbon footprints, recycling and reusing whatever is in their field. Without further ado, then, here are the three of the best. But who’ll take top spot?

3. Environmental Designer Extraordinaire: The Orb Web Spider

Weaving webs tres magnifique, the female orb web spider is one of natural world’s top designers, but she’s one of its thriftiest recyclers too. She’s known to eat her web at night, before spinning a new one, to recoup some of the energy expended producing silk that’s rich in protein and stronger than steel. What’s more, this economical creative maestro uses her own body as a yardstick to measure her webs, for über-ergonomic design. An icon in many cultures, the web crawler is also one of the Earth’s premier pest controllers, with flies and mosquitoes as their favourite bites. But don’t be fooled by her feminine charms. The smaller male risks being taken for a snack when he approaches, or similarly recycled once his work done. This spin-ster gains points for both style and execution.

2. Working Class Hero: The Roller Dung Beetle

Able to roll whopping great balls of dung past practically any obstacle, the roller dung beetle has a work ethic to make any bug proud. It’s good old hard labour. The dung beetle does the rolling – and guards against the theft of his property from rivals – while his spouse hitches a ride or follows behind. Like a mini-JCB, the industrious beetle gets rid of huge amounts of animal dung, and plays a vital role in agriculture. By eating and burying dung, he helps with soil structure and nutrient cycling; and people and livestock benefit from reduced numbers of germ-bearing pests like flies. This trooper’s poop-scooping even earned him major status in Ancient Egypt. There, the ‘scarab’ was revered as a sacred symbol tied to the sun god, and his hieroglyph conveyed essential ideas of being and transformation.

1. Underground Mixing Legend: The Earthworm

Though a shy and retiring hermaphrodite, the earthworm has made a definite noise on the underground eco scene – sometimes heard as a gurgling sound as it moves through its mucus-lined tunnels. Organic gardeners and farmers are big fans, and Charles Darwin himself sent shout-outs, “doubt[ing] whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world”. Blind to such praise, this down-to-earth decomposing dude does crucial soil-fertilising work, breaking down organic matter like fallen leaves into rich humus and mixing it up with earth. With burrowing skills you’ve got to dig, the earthworm actively helps to drain and pump air into the soil. And the coiled faecal casts you see marking its turf make minerals and nutrients available to be picked up by neighbourhood plant life.

World cow

Invertebrate Astronauts Make Space History

It's one small step for Tardigrada, and one giant leap for the animal kingdom: The toughest creature on Earth has survived a trip into space.

Except for a few hardy strains of bacteria, any other creature would have been destroyed -- but tardigrades handled the voyage as though it were a dry spell on their local moss patch.

"They have claws and eyes. They are real animals. And this is the first time such an animal was tested in space," said Petra Rettberg, an Institute of Aerospace Medicine microbiologist.

Better known as water bears, tardigrades are eight-legged invertebrates visible to the naked eye and found throughout the world, making them a biology class favorite.

They're capable of halting their metabolisms during times of extreme privation, and can repair DNA damage caused by extraordinary doses of radiation -- a phenomenon that's piqued scientific curiosity and prompted researchers to shoot tardigrades into naked orbit around the Earth.

"The repair -- how fast, how efficient, with or without errors -- is different, but basic damage is the same," said Rettberg, who helped design a tardigrade containment system attached to the Foton-M3 satellite, launched last September by a consortium of national space agencies.

The tardigrades had already been coaxed into an anhydrobiotic state, during which their metabolisms slow by a factor of 10,000. This allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, dessication and temperatures above 300 degrees Fahrenheit and below minus 240 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once in orbit, the tardigrade box popped open. Some were exposed to low-level cosmic radiation, and others to both cosmic and unfiltered solar radiation. All were exposed to the frigid vacuum of space.

Back on Earth, tardigrades that had basked in cosmic radiation revived and reproduced at rates comparable to an unexposed control group. Those dosed with solar radiation were less likely to wake -- but that even a few survived, wrote Rettberg's team in findings published today in Current Biology, was remarkable.

Just how the invertebrate astronauts protected themselves "remains a mystery," wrote the researchers. Rettberg's next task is to identify the responsible genes -- a basic step, perhaps, in better understanding and improving human DNA repair.

Tardigrades may even provide insights into adaptations necessary for survival in off-Earth colonies, though they could not live actively in the extreme and nutrient-poor environments of Mars or the moon.

However, Rettberg cautioned against expecting too much from such early findings.

"It'll just be interesting to see what the mechanisms are in tardigrades, compared to the very simple ones in bacteria and more complex systems in higher organisms," she said. "But in addition, it's just fun."

Beetles Evolving as Lovers or Fighters

The evolutionary tradeoff between becoming a bigger fighter or lover could lead to new species among dung beetle populations.

Male beetles may not transform in the blink of an eye, but natural selection seems to have driven rapid evolution in the size of their fighting horns — and their reproductive tools — during a time period of just 50 years in one newly studied case.

"As horns get bigger, copulatory organs get smaller, or vice versa," said Armin Moczek, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University-Bloomington. "What was not known was how frequently and how fast this can occur in nature, and whether this can drive the evolution of new species."

Making tradeoffs

Moczek and fellow researcher Harald Parzer examined four geographically separate populations of a horned dung beetle species called Onthophagus taurus. They found that the relative investment made by each beetle population into horns and genitalia could differ by more than three times the average investment for the overall species.

The different sizes reflect a strategy of making investments with limited resources into either horns or genitalia. If beetles live in low-density environments where fighting is common, males with larger horns and smaller genitalia may find the most success in winning mates. But if fighting is less common, having larger genitalia at the expense of horn size may prove best.

Such tradeoffs between certain characteristics are an "ancient and still poorly understood issue in biology," Moczek told LiveScience. Biologists are not surprised that secondary sexual characteristics such as horns can drive change in the primary sexual characteristic, or the genitalia, but only two previous studies had hinted at this in action.

Size matters?

Evolutionary biologists think that such changes in genitalia size and shape can eventually lead to new species, when individuals from different populations become sexually incompatible. The size of genitalia tends to resist evolutionary change in order to preserve a species' identity, but evolutionary pressure on the dung beetle horns has forced the changes in genitalia as well.

"We proposed that maybe these tradeoffs are an avenue that forces species in directions they wouldn't go with otherwise with genitalia," Moczek said.

Individuals in most species do not choose mates based on a "size matters" mentality toward genitalia, so the tradeoff between the two characteristics also provides a mechanism to explain the link between genitalia and origin of species.

Moczek and Parzer looked at 10 other related beetle species and found similar variety in horn and genitalia sizes, which suggests that the same natural selection pressures continue to work after species have split off.

"If this is all it takes to change genitalia, it may be easier to make new species than we thought," Moczek said.

Getting around

The O. taurus dung beetle originated in Italy, but has spread to other parts of the world to live in far-flung populations. Humans introduced the dung beetles to Australia in the 1960s as competitors to ward off swarms of flies that hover over cow manure, and the beetles became so beloved there that Moczek found himself universally welcomed down under because of his research.

"When I mentioned I was working on dung beetles, I immediately had a beer in my hand and a place to stay," Moczek recalled.

The beetles also showed up unannounced in the United States during the 1960s. The separate beetle populations in the United States, Italy, and western and eastern Australia now allow biologists to see what evolutionary changes have occurred within the past 50 years — and perhaps figure out where the beetles might go next.

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