Endangered? What do we know about the polar bear? find pictures!

I had heard about Polar bears being stranded on an iceflow but thought, well, there's endless ice and must be many more bears who were smarter than to get stranded!




Then today I reread this December 2007 report that the summer Polar ice cap will be gone by 2013 or maybe even a year or so earlier!

So what do you know about polar bears and what they depend on to survive? What other habitats and refuges do they have in the wild? Are they threatened? Just because one can take this picture does not mean that the Polar bears are about to go extinct. Still, this is a stunning image. I thought to myself, who takes pictures of Polar bears, maybe you have some? Can you find photographs with attribution of possible to give us a better idea.

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

So what do you know about polar bears and what they depend on to survive?

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Ice and seals

http://www.worldwildlife.org/polarbears/pubs/vanishing_kingdom.pdf

What other habitats and refuges do they have in the wild?

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None

Are they threatened?

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Threatened to the point of extinction is correct. If the ice is gone, they will be too.

Thinning sea ice has made it harder for the bears to hunt, leading to weight loss and 10 percent fewer cubs than 20 years ago - Harvard Science 2001, Professor James McCarthy, Harvard -

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McCarthy, co-chaired one of three working groups of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are one of 4 marine mammal species managed by the U.S. Department of Interior1. The USGS Alaska Science Center conducts research on polar bears to better inform Departmental policy makers regarding conservation of the species and its habitat. Our studies, ongoing since 1985, are focused primarily on population dynamics and habitat use. The majority of our research is conducted on the Southern Beaufort Sea population of Alaska and neighboring Canada. The USGS studied polar bears in the Chukchi Sea during the 1990’s and plans to begin new work on this population (shared with Russia) in 2008. Results of our studies are published in peer-reviewed journal articles and reports.

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http://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/presentations/EC1.8_Durner.pdf

Georg Baumann said:

None

Threatened to the point of extinction is correct. If the ice is gone, they will be too.

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Not true, this is an admitted - and very unfortunate - embellishment in, for instance, An Inconvenient Truth.* The habitat of ice bears is not ice per se, they do live in cold areas, which are often ice-covered, but many of them are living on ice-covered ground. They easily adapt to living on non-ice-covered ground as people living near them know quite well.

Their numbers have been rising over the past 2 decades; they may not be as numerous as Homo sapiens but are not wuite threatened. The decline in numbers before that, probably even now for the sub-poplations that are still in decline, are due to hunting, not habitat loss.

It might be that over the next few generations their fur colour changes [again] to get darker. Some [taxonomy] biologists argue the polar bear is not an individual species but a variety/sub-species of the brown bear. From which it would follow that the rumours of his demise are not quite so serious.


PS: If you look around you will even still find dinosaurs, though under a different designation.




*Even quite obvious in the movie, which for once relies totally on a CGI projection of what might be instead of on actual footage and statistics of what is. As Daniel Dennett once said, 'There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.' And that's the unfortunate part: this kind of embellishment, inaccuracies or plain out lies [not Gore, I am thinking here of "documentarists" like Michael Moore] hurt the [good] cause more than they help bring out awareness.

Their numbers have been rising over the past 2 decades; they may not be as numerous as Homo sapiens but are not wuite threatened.

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Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Ursidae
Genus: Ursus
Species: Ursus maritimus

I am sorry, but I have no time for such utter nonsense!

...outa here.... *poof*

One source to read up on polar bears [and other mammals] is The New Encyclopedia of Mammals, edited by David MacDonald, published through several outlets worldwide by Andromeda Oxford in 2001. Not a technical monography for experts but written for interested laymen.

One paper on Ursus maritimus' close relationship to Ursus arctos: Lisette P. Waits, Sandra L. Talbot, R.H. Ward and G. F. Shields (April 1998). ["Mitochondrial DNA Phylogeography of the North American Brown Bear and Implications for Conservation" pp. 408-417. Conservation Biology, referenced, among others, by Wikipedia in its article on polar bears.

Surely Wikipedia is anything but a reliable source but at least the international one gives sources on scientific issues.

IUCN does list polar bears as 'vulnerable' with a very nuanced assessment:

There is little doubt that polar bears will have a lesser AOO, EOO and habitat quality in the future. However, no direct relation exists between these measures and the abundance of polar bears. While some have speculated that polar bears might become extinct within 100 years from now, which would indicate a population decrease of >50% in 45 years based on a precautionary approach due to data uncertainty. A more realistic evaluation of the risk involved in the assessment makes it fair to suspect population reduction of >30%

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This quote and the complete assessment is available on-line.

Even the WWF is cautious in linking global warming to a possible future demise of polar bears. One of the reasons is surely that nobody clearly knows how specific speciation/adaptation will work out over time or in how much time.

Adopting an apocalyptic view - most often coupled to a high cuteness factor [Knut or Flocke] - on every aspect one encounters is not helpful. Nobody in his right mind will deny problems coming our way, from flooding cities and countries to biodiversity loss as far as current species we know are concerned. We should, however, try to refrain from crying wolf for bad reasons.