Monthly Archives: April 2016

Polar bear habitat update end of April 2016: Plenty of sea ice for feeding

Posted on April 28, 2016 | Comments Off

So, here we are near the end of the first month of the Arctic spring and there is still more ice than usual off Labrador and conditions in the Barents Sea are improving daily. The fear-mongers can blather all they like about the potential risks of bears swimming in summer – but spring is the critical season as far as sea ice is concerned for polar bears and all polar bear biologists know it. Polar bears consume 2/3 of all the food they need for the year during April-June and so far, ice conditions are looking just fine.

Cambridge Bay_we re OK_from Joe Prins

There is enough ice where there needs to be ice for polar bears to gorge themselves on new-born ringed and bearded seals – and that’s really all that matters. More ice off Labrador means more hunting ground for the Davis Strait polar bears that depend on the tens of thousands of young harp seals born this year off the Front.

Harp seal pup_DFO Newfoundland
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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged bearded seal, facts, feeding, harp seal, hunting, Labrador, polar bear, polynya, ringed seal, sea ice, Southern Beaufort, Svalbard

No evidence that long-distance swimming contributed to Beaufort Sea polar bear population crash of 2004-2006

Posted on April 21, 2016 | Comments Off

The air is thick with desperation on the polar bear front:

“[Andrew] Derocher said the polar bear population in the Beaufort Sea has fallen more than 50 per cent in the past 10 years.

“So it is a concern that this is probably one of the factors associated with the population decline,” he said.

Derocher_CBC news 19 April 2016

As the CBC report in which this quote appears states immediately afterwards, there is no evidence for such a thing in the paper under discussion:

“The study found no direct evidence of that – all polar bears appeared to survive the swims recorded in the study.”

There is no truth to Derocher’s first statement either. Desperation – you don’t have to be a scientist to sense it. And the media wonder why people don’t trust them…

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Beaufort Sea, Derocher, desperation, Earth Day, facts, hype, Michaels, polar bear, population crash, sea ice, swimming

Most Beaufort polar bears swim from ice floe to floe during breakup, study shows

Posted on April 19, 2016 | Comments Off

swimming3_USGS

You may have seen the headlines in Canadian news outlets over the last 2 days.
“Polar bears swimming farther as sea ice recedes, study shows”

“Melting sea ice forces polar bears to swim longer, farther: study” [“Bear biologist Andrew Derocher says the forced swims are particularly hard on mothers with young cubs”]

“Polar bears swimming longer, farther because of melting sea ice, study finds”

Oddly, none of the above news reports said where the paper was published or mentioned the name of the lead author – only University of Alberta co-author Andrew Derocher was interviewed (see the only press release I could find here, issued by the San Diego Zoo where the lead author is now employed).[update: CBC ran another story a day later that corrected these omissions]

But what did the study actually say?

Significantly, no bears died while swimming during the two lowest sea ice extent summers since 1979 and no evidence was presented that swims were “particularly hard on mothers with young cubs.” The quotes from the paper below sum it up for Beaufort Sea (BS) bears (the inclusion of Hudson Bay (HB) bears in this study seems gratuitous and potentially misleading, since only a few swam anyway – only 15 out of 59):

“….91% (91/100) of the swims in the BS occurred before the annual September minimum sea ice extent had been reached. …In the BS, 81% (29/36) of swims started and ended in pack ice…”

So, despite what may be implied during media moments, Beaufort Sea polar bears were not frantically trying to reach the sea ice from land so that they could attempt to keep feeding over the summer – most of their swimming was done during breakup in July and August from one bit of pack ice to another and they showed no evidence of harm from doing so. Map from the study and more quotes below.
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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Beaufort, Derocher, forced swims, Hudson Bay, mothers with young cubs, Pilfold, polar bear, receding sea ice, sea ice, summer, swim longer, swimming, swimming further

More politics of polar bears courtesy WWF: impaled polar bear sculpture

Posted on April 16, 2016 | Comments Off

The offensively tasteless “art” produced by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, for the specific purpose of influencing politics has reappeared.

impaled-polar-bear-sculpture-CO2 spike-2016-4 Copenhagen

From Business Insider (16 April 2016): The sculpture of an impaled polar bear goes on display in Denmark to show global warming is becoming ‘unbearable.’

‘Unbearable’ is a portable exhibit originally designed for the Paris COP21 climate talks in December 2015 but here it is again in Copenhagen. [h/t Tom Nelson]

It’s simply the Politics of Polar Bears on a global scale that has no basis in science: polar bear numbers have not declined as CO2 has risen. Jens Galschiøt’s tasteless and costly message funded by WWF is not much better than Plane Stupid’s 2009 ad of polar bears falling from the sky (see below). It’s just about as asinine and not supported by science. Continue reading →

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Polar bear attacks, Population, Sea ice habitat

Tagged attacks, carbon dioxide, climate change, CO2, fossil fuels, global warming, impaled polar bear, oil pipeline, Paris, polar bear, polar bear patrol, politics, population size, sculpture, sea ice, unbearable, WWF

Polar bear biologists imply “summer sea ice” and “sea ice” are synonymous

Posted on April 13, 2016 | Comments Off

According to sea ice experts, winter sea ice habitat for polar bears is not expected to decline at all by 2050 and the critical spring sea ice that polar bears need for gorging on young seals and for mating is not predicted to change much (Durner et al. 2007, 2009), which is why computer modelled predictions about the dire future for polar bears only assessed the potential future effects of declining summer sea ice (e.g. Amstrup et al. 2007; Stirling and Derocher 2012). Note spring is April-June.

Female with cubs Beaufort_USFWS credit 2007 w label_sm

See if that fact is clear in the interview responses by out-spoken polar bear biologists that has just been published in the polar bear portion (“Beyond the polar bear”) of this year’s University of Alberta magazine spring climate change feature. If you can get past the “canaries in the coal mine” opener…
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Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat

Tagged advocacy, Derocher, facts, interview, polar bear, predictions, sea ice, spring sea ice, starving polar bears, Stirling, summer sea ice

Tracking polar bears in the Beaufort Sea – new crop of tagged bears for 2016

Posted on April 9, 2016 | Comments Off

Five more bears were tagged near the Southern Beaufort Sea coast last month, all in the western portion of the coast where Chukchi Sea bears are often encountered. They join the one female who seems to have made a den way out over the continental shelf, where she’s been all winter.

putting_collar_on_polar_bear_slider_USGS

This is the March 2016 follow-up to my post on the July 2013 track map for female polar bears being followed by satellite in the Beaufort Sea by the US Geological Survey (USGS) – “Ten out of ten polar bears being tracked this summer in the Beaufort Sea are on the ice.”

Five tagged bears are relatively few compared to eight last spring, and thirteen in 2013 [added to 7 from the previous year for a total of twenty, which were down to 13 by June] but the same as five tagged in 2014. This spring, three of the USGS tagged bears have glue-on transmitters, which means they are either males or juvenile bears rather than females (which are fitted with collars):

“In collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service we are also experimenting with glue-on and ear tag satellite transmitters, which can be deployed on adult male bears and younger, still-growing bears.”

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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Barrow, Beaufort Sea, glue-on transmitters, ice thickness, sea ice, tagging, thick spring ice, tracking polar bears, USGS

Polar bear visits Newfoundland community of Goose Cove

Posted on April 8, 2016 | Comments Off

Goose Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula, western Newfoundland, had a polar bear visitor onshore yesterday. That’s typical for this region at the this time of year. The bear wasn’t seen, reported the Northern Pen (8 April 2016), but resident Jim Rice, who spotted the bear tracks in the snow, had this to say:

“I put my boot into one of the tracks, and I wear a size 12 boot, and it was the whole way around my boot,” said Rice. “So I didn’t stick around too long after that because I didn’t know if it was still in the area.”

Polar bear foot_USFWS_PolarBearNews2013

Goose Cove is featured in my polar bear attack thriller, EATEN in which polar bears come ashore much earlier than usual because their food source has failed – and terrorized the northern coast. A scarier story than well-fed bears ashore in April, after feeding for a month or so on harp seal pups.

Map below, from my novel, as well as sea ice conditions at the time.
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Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks

Tagged attacks, Goose Cove, Newfoundland, onshore, problem bears, sea ice

Southern Hudson Bay polar bears are not starving to death

Posted on April 5, 2016 | Comments Off

Reposted from 23 March 2016: Despite the fact that the polar bears of Southern Hudson Bay (SHB) live further south year round than any others, a recent study found their average body weight has declined relatively little since the 1980s. There has been no decline in the size of the population over that time either.

James Bay female and cub_Ontaro Govt

Remarkably – despite what we are told about how critical breakup dates are to polar bear health and survival in Hudson Bay – this study found that for SHB bears, the small decline in body condition index correlated only with freeze-up dates, not breakup dates or length of the ice-free season. They also found that regional breakup and freeze-up dates relevant to polar bears in this area was the day when ice cover reached 5% (not 50%).

In other words, SHB polar bears left the ice (or returned to it) when the average ice cover near the coast was about 5%. This finding is yet more evidence that the meteorological definition of “breakup” (date of 50% ice cover) used by many researchers (see discussion here) is not appropriate for describing the seasonal movements of polar bears on and off shore.

The news (two weeks after this post originally went up, see also here), however, is about the bit of weight decline, hyped to the maximum.