Okay... so we know they USED to keep the animals for studying (bears in cages, sharks & dolphins in the acquarium).

Questions:

1. How long ago?
2. Why did they stop?
3. Did the animals "escape"? (and how)?

We've seen the polar bears, and the shark... and a horse.

The others are usupers, leftovers from DHARMA, children maybe

I'm thinking someone still uses the animals, releasing them at opportune moments, like the shark. In "Special" just before the polar bear attacks Walt, you can see white smoke in the background behind him in one shot, as if it were released from some door that goes to a freezer of some sort.

I'm guessing they got bored with animals, and moved on to humans. :biggrin:

Im guessing they were all freed some time ago, so it cant have been longer than a lifespan of a shark or polar bear, whatever that might be.

Maybe the animals got really smart beyond the experimental stage and escaped. So now the leftover Dharma brats are doing a psychological study on captivity, the desire to be free, and adaptation with their human subjects.

I know animals, and I clearly heard Hyenas in the background when they showed Sawyer in one of his cage scenes.

You could also hear whale calls in the room where Jack was. This seemed to be in the last scene only.

Well, at least now we know where the DHARMA shark got its logo tattoo...

as to how a Polar Bear was on the island! Makes sense now. Must have escaped or let go from the animal studies..

Yeah but how on earth could a polar bear have figured out how to get a fish biscuit?? :confused:

Because they have gotten frecking smart! That's why! Some experiments and wham! We have polarbears like we had sharks in Deep Blue Sea with Samuel jackson. Only this is Deep Jungle Polar Bears... woosh how wicked!

But why polar bears (who are very unsuited for tropical climate) and not an ordinary brown bear or some other kind of bear more suited for the temperature of a tropical island ???

Yeah but how on earth could a polar bear have figured out how to get a fish biscuit?? :confused:

From http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/bear-facts/polar-bear-iq/

"Her conclusion: the great white bears are just as smart as apes."

Yeah but how on earth could a polar bear have figured out how to get a fish biscuit?? :confused:

polar bears really like fish biscuits...

Maybe this will explain the weird looking "bird" from season 1...

I live in Massachusetts, and it gets really hot in the summertime, usually up into the 90's. And there was a polar bear that lived in the zoo in the next town over for 30 years. So they can survive in the hot temps. They probably don't like it, but I think they can manage. I think the Others had to have let these animals go at one point. We saw that shark circling the raft with the Dharma symbol on it as well.

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I thought somewhere, maybe one of the Dharma films, there's a reference to "adapting animals to alternate environments" or something like that. Maybe it's from the dharma website.

Last night explained the polar bears as we witnessed the cages and heard Zeke’s comment about how it “only took the bears two hours.” It also explained the shark with the Dharma logo on it because Jack was sitting in an aquarium tank. They also planted the seed for us to possibly see Dharma dolphins in the future. This is how the writers explain things to us. They don’t flesh out too many details. They feed us a small scrap like this and let our minds fill in the blanks.

It looks to me the there are or were intelligence experiments going on on the island. Hence the studies with the pneumatic tubes, the hatch, the test for Sawyer to get food pellets, and the interest in Walt.

Do you think it escaped like all the other animals??

unless it grew legs and walked out of the jungle.

I wonder what other creatures are on the loose? They certainly would have more than the ones we've seen to date. Other cold weather critters could include elk, penguins, hockey players (Canadian of course), walrus, and Nordic fishermen.

If the facilities are all abandonded or in disrepair, the animals probably escaped or were set free

I think they let it go because they knew sawey and micheal and jin were still in the water.

i think much like the other experiments, the shark was set free due to lack of findings, funding, or even interst

I thought somewhere it said they were trying to revert the polar bears to when they could survive in a hot climate or something like that. I do remember they were doing climate adaptation experiments.

But why polar bears (who are very unsuited for tropical climate) and not an ordinary brown bear or some other kind of bear more suited for the temperature of a tropical island ???You answered your own question there really, There was obviously animal studies undertaken and knowing lost it wouldn't have been the normal animal studies you would expect. So putting a polar bear who is suited to a colder climates in a warmer climates to see what effects if any it would have on the bear seems logical.

I think possibly that maybe the animal studies went wrong sort of like in deep blue see and they all escaped or something or they finished testing the animals and are now doing the same tests on humans.

In the lower right hand corner of the blast door map, it states "acclerated de-territorial(ization) of ursus martimus through gene therapy and extreme climate change". Ursus Martimus, im pretty sure, is the latin binomial name for the polar bear.
I think the Others let the polar bears go free because they're no longer actively experimenting with them. I also think there used to be more than one polar bear in Sawyers cage, that would help a lot with the puzzle.

the only thing i'm wondering is how the polar bears were able to get all the way near the losties. The Other's village was really far from the fuselage, especially considering the terrain.

Also when Sawyer was escaping, he ran by what looked like a huge birdcage. So the big birds have to be Dharma.

the only thing i'm wondering is how the polar bears were able to get all the way near the losties. The Other's village was really far from the fuselage, especially considering the terrain.

The Losties arn't at the others villiage, they are most likely near another hatch.

Also the Polar Bears were most likely released long ago.

Yeah, the zoological facility (Hydra) is probably quite a ways from othersville, you would have been able to see something that big in the zoom out shot of the village, which covered quite a bit of land

Two years of lurking, and it's polar bears that inspire me to finally post. Yeesh, I need to re-examine my life.

Anyway, I used to work at Sea World in Sunny San Diego as a guide/narrator, sometimes at Wild Arctic, which is our open-air arctic animal exhibit. People were always blown away when they would find out that the snow was plastic sculpted rock.

Polar bears, along with belugas, manatees, and arctic foxes (all the critters of the exhibit) are all mammals, and therefore warmblooded. Warmblooded creatures maintain a constant internal body temperature, making the external atmosphere irrelevant to internal body functioning (as opposed to say, fish, who are easily affected by the external temperature). Polar bears, belugas, and manatees simply store less blubbery fat, since they don't need to keep as warm in warmer climes.

Bottom line - it probably wasn't a super-polar bear on the island (at least in terms of the weather/adaptation), just a skinny one.

Does it seem weird to anyone else that the Dharma symbol on the shark was not the Dharma symbol seen in the Hydra hatch?

The symbol on the shark was a joke. The writers have talked about it several times. I guess it was put on there as a joke by one of the special effects guys, and they accidentaly left it on there.

hockey players (Canadian of course)

We already had Ethan. :biggrin:

The symbol on the shark was a joke. The writers have talked about it several times. I guess it was put on there as a joke by one of the special effects guys, and they accidentaly left it on there.

If you watch the special features on the season 2 DVD, they mention that it was planned to have the dharma logo on the shark. It was NOT a joke. The logo did show up brighter than they expected it to show up though.

If you watch the special features on the season 2 DVD, they mention that it was planned to have the dharma logo on the shark. It was NOT a joke. The logo did show up brighter than they expected it to show up though.


Right. In the special features of Season Two they say they put it there as kind of a "Hey, look what we can do" type of thing. They never expected people to see it when it aired. However, because we did see it, some people are taking it as gospel. At the point we saw the shark in Season Two, they hadn't even thought of the Hydra Station yet.

yes...and the symbol originally seen on the shark wsant snappy enough to be an official DI symbol

i think much like the other experiments, the shark was set free due to lack of findings, funding, or even interst
I think that you are on the right track with they were just done working with the animals. I have wondered about the whole virus thing affecting the animals as well as humans. would they have done a "noahs Ark" thing and had to test the vaccine on other animals as well?
:confused:

I'm thinking someone still uses the animals, releasing them at opportune moments, like the shark. In "Special" just before the polar bear attacks Walt, you can see white smoke in the background behind him in one shot, as if it were released from some door that goes to a freezer of some sort.

that was water from a stream behind Walt

I think the Others are actually PETA militants who ambushed the Dharma initiative, released all the animals, and are now conducting retaliatory experiments on humans on behalf of the animals. Just waiting for Pamela Anderson to show up now.:biggrin:

I think the rag tag bunch of Others snuck into the Suburanite Others camp and freed all the animals...Not Pam Anderson!!

Perhaps that Carl dude is one of the rag tag bunch that they captured?