Bear snacks on US submarine

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6510163%255E13762,00.html

Bear snacks on US sub
By Scott Jenkins
May 29, 2003


IT'S not often a submariner would see a polar bear in his periscope, but that's exactly what happened recently in Prudehoe Bay off the northern coast of Alaska.

During training exercises near the North Pole, the submarine USS Connecticut poked its sail and fin through the ice.

An officer turned on the scope's camera and this bizarre image of a bear trying to eat the sub's rear fin was the result.

The bear played with the fin for half an hour, thinking the giant object was food.

After realising his find was inedible, he decided to do the natural bear thing and attack.

But the assault lasted only a few minutes and the damage to the sub's fin was described as being minor.

The structure wasn't designed as a polar bear snack, but life's like that sometimes.

More than 20,000 polar bears live in Arctic waters.

They normally reside on pack ice or ice floes and usually prey on seals.

But this curious fellow couldn't believe his luck when the rudder made its appearance.

US and Russian subs have been operating under the Arctic for more than half a century.

In 1958, the USS Nautilus passed under the Pole for the first time, and in 1962 two nuclear subs surfaced there. All of this activity was designed to prove that ballistic missiles could be launched from the Pole.

The subs have also measured the thickness of the Arctic crust using sonar technology, and the ever-decreasing thickness has caused major problems for the bear population.

Some of them have been forced to come ashore earlier because of the Arctic's longer warm season.

The USS Connecticut is one of newest US submarines and it's unlikely that encounters with polar bears were included in the operations manual.

Submariners have seen polar bears in the past, but this is probably the first time the bear saw the sub first and mistook it for a huge chunk of bear food.

In a strange twist, to be filed under "It Could Only Happen in America", the USS Connecticut and its crew may end up with legal problems over the run-in with the bear.

The US Marine Mammal Protection Act makes it illegal to cause disruption to any animal's normal marine behaviour.

And this includes interrupting their feeding patterns.

Because the sub didn't immediately return below the surface, its actions could be determined to be "disruptive".

Quite unbearable, really.

The Daily Telegraph