Posted onDecember 11, 2025|Comments Off on Was a recent wolf encounter near Tofino an aborted predatory attack?
It has recently been revealed that a human-wolf ” encounter,” in which a beach walker was forced to take refuge in the ocean when two wolves kept advancing in menacing fashion, has been described by Parks Canada officials as benign-sounding “escorting behaviour” rather than an aborted predatory attack.
This week, I was looking online to see if there had been any further reports of wolf encounters near Tofino since the end of October, when two recent incidents made national news. I discovered that a full week later, a local First Nations newspaper revealed some interesting details not available earlier, see “Encounters climb as habituated wolves establish core territory near Ucluelet” (7 November 2025).
Here’s my question: Are Parks Canada officials hiding important details of recent encounters – or sanitizing them with scientific-sounding language – to protect wolves at the expense of keeping park visitors safe?
Posted onDecember 5, 2025|Comments Off on A Wolf Attack Thriller for Christmas
My latest novel is done and ready in time for Christmas, but only by the skin of my teeth!
It’s called DON’T RUN and it’s a wolf attack thriller set in the little surfing town of Tofino, British Columbia (on the west coast of Vancouver Island).
When wolves consider humans easy prey, it makes for big trouble. This science-based novel, set in the winter of 2029, follows the exploits of RCMP wildlife safety specialist Luke Robinson, who moves to the Canadian surfing town of Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He quickly becomes embroiled in a local wolf controversy, which escalates into an epic wolf attack crisis. First dogs disappear, then people start to die. But what, exactly, can he help the town do to protect itself when wolf packs go rogue—or more to the point, will resident’s loyalty to local indigenous peoples and activist conservationists prevent them from doing what needs to be done?
The story challenges the traditional myth that wolves never attack people. I’ve been working on this for more than five years but ironically, over the last six months, news reports such as here and here, indicate wolves in the area where the story is set have been getting increasingly aggressive and predatory. Just a few months ago (based on warnings issued in October), two wolves pursued a walker on Long Beach so aggressively that they sought refuge in the water (no mention of a dog). Another pair of wolves charged at and pursued a visitor with a dog on a leash for an extended time period. Incidents like these, although fewer in number and less threatening in nature, have been reported since at least 2017.
What will happen in 2026 or 2027 if Parks Canada bans dogs entirely from Pacific Rim National Park? What will the hungry wolves in the Park do if they no longer have dogs to prey upon? What if even more wolves move in from the island’s interior? Questions like these inspired this new thriller.
Hope you enjoy! If you do, please go back and leave an Amazon review – it really helps other readers decide to give it a try and that promotes sales. Available in paperback and Kindle ebook formats.
On Amazon in the US here, in Canada here, UK here.
PS. As promised, winners of the 2022 fundraising contest for my Polar Bear Evolution book have their names used as characters in this new novel. Congratulations Ned Komar and John Macgowan!
Comments Off on A Wolf Attack Thriller for Christmas
Posted onFebruary 26, 2025|Comments Off on No News is Good News on Polar Bear Day: Celebrate With 35% Off Polar Bear Evolution
In honour of International Polar Bear Day coming up on Thursday February 27, I’ve discounted the price of my Polar Bear Evolution book by 40% for the next month in order to encourage evolutionary thinking about polar bears (in all markets: see links at the end of this post). UPDATE: Sale extended until June.
Instead of asking whether polar bears will survive a bit of warming over the next few decades, ask yourself how they survived more than 100,000 years of unimaginable changes in Arctic climate (both much warmer and colder) before now?
Posted onSeptember 5, 2024|Comments Off on 12 years of Polar Bear Science winding down as I transition to writing Biology Bites on Substack
While I’m not done with polar bears completely, it seems I’ve been so successful at informing the public and defanging the rabid activists that fewer examples of nonsense seem to pop up. And it turns out I have other things I’d like to write about.
I’ve spent my entire career as an unconventional scientist and I’m betting that many of the stories I’ve amassed along the way will be of interest to a wider audience. So, after 12 years of blogging here at PolarBearScience, I’m branching out with a new writing forum called “Biology Bites,” hosted on Substack.
Posted onFebruary 20, 2024|Comments Off on NY Times pushes an implausible story of polar bear evolution and what makes a species
Carl Zimmer over at the New York Times penned a misleading story of speciation, using the polar bear as an example. It explains polar bear evolution based on a genetic interpretation that ignores the fossil record, bear behaviour, and geological history. [h/t Kip Hanson].
In my opinion, this kind of ‘science communication’ is more misleading than enlightening because it fails to alert readers to the fact that the topic is actually more complicated and gives the impression that the author considers readers too stupid to understand a more accurate explanation.
Polar Bear Evolution does a better job for those who are really interested in the process: it doesn’t hide the complicated nature of speciation or polar bear evolution. It doesn’t pretend to present “the truth” but explains how a good scientist gets to a plausible explanation that best fits the evidence.
Posted onJanuary 18, 2024|Comments Off on Tom Nelson interview with me about the failed polar bear narrative and rapid evolution
You can watch my interview with Tom Nelson about the latest issues in polar bear conservation and highlights of my latest book, Polar Bear Evolution.
On Youtube:
Tom tells me, “It’s also up on other video sites such as Rumble and BitChute, and will soon be available on other podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts (most, but not all, of those are audio-only). It should also be on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podvine, Overcast, Amazon Music podcasts, Audible podcasts, Castbox, RadioPublic, Twitter, etc.”
Summary: Susan Crockford, a zoologist, discusses the challenges in accurately estimating polar bear populations and the ongoing debate between Inuit communities and polar bear specialists regarding population sizes. She also shares her theory on the role of thyroid hormones in polar bear evolution and the quick adaptation of species to new environments using the example of the Russian foxes.
A list of topics covered, by time-stamp in the interview, is listed below.
Posted onNovember 8, 2023|Comments Off on Polar Bear Evolution pre-Christmas book sale: discounts on all formats!
I have reduced prices on all formats of my Polar Bear Evolution book for four weeks starting today (8 November-6 December 2023), in time for holiday gift-giving. The ebook version has the largest price reduction (60% of regular price, to US$17.40) but the other discounts are also substantial. This sale is a time limited offer: don’t miss out! Links below.
The author of Polar Bear Evolution, Susan Crockford, is a good, credentialed scientist. Her writing is clear; her thinking is also. She has a broad understanding of biology and an informed paleo perspective. Crockford condenses a very large literature on polar bear biology and evolution in this book which will help readers understand the science related to the evolution of an Arctic species. Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is its synthesis of information from the fields of wildlife biology, molecular evolution, paleontology, and climate. Her original ideas and hypotheses on thyroid hormone’s role in evolution are very important and add a credible mechanism of phenotypic change which complements the literature on molecular genetic evolution. Polar Bear Evolution is an important contribution to science and its application in evolutionary biology and wildlife biology. Matthew A. Cronin, Ph.D.
Available at the links below (others also available):
Posted onJune 26, 2023|Comments Off on No evidence polar bears survived Eemian warmth because they were not yet fully ice-dependent
Is evolution primarily fast or slow? Does it take hundreds of thousands of years or a few generations to produce a new species? Ignoring vast evidence to the contrary, most geneticists insist that evolutionary change is imperceptibly slow and one of them is using this misconception to support the human-caused climate change narrative.
For polar bears, the question is this: could brown bears (aka grizzlies) have survived for hundreds of thousands of years living in a completely different habitat–the perpetually-frozen world of Arctic sea ice–before significant biological changes took place? I contend the answer is no. Moreover, if I am correct that polar bears arose ca. 140,000 thousand years ago (140kya) during the height of an extreme glacial period, the fossil evidence concurs. Analysis of fossil remains show that by about 115-130kya at the latest (after perhaps 10k years), polar bears were primarily eating seals as their modern counterparts do and their bones had lost the distinctive features of their grizzly ancestors.
But that’s the maximum time frame: research on other animals indicate that such critical changes almost certainly took place long before that, within the first few generations of life on the sea ice. If coordinated changes had not taken place very quickly, within ecological time, brown bears would simply not have survived the harsh life on Arctic sea ice.
Posted onJune 21, 2023|Comments Off on Claims of interspecies hanky-panky have unfairly sullied polar bear & Neanderthal reputations
One big question I asked before writing my book on polar bear evolution was this: did interbreeding with grizzlies, aka brown bears, profoundly impact polar bear history, as geneticists insist? Or is something else going on?
Polar bear hybrid, 3/4 grizzly (offspring of a hybrid female backcrossed to a grizzly male), Ulukhaktok, Victoria Island, Canada, 2010.
Virtually all genetic studies done in recent years, which I review in my book, conclude that hybridization with grizzlies has happened to various degrees over the course of polar bear history (e.g. Cahill et al. 2013, 2018; Cronin et al. 1991; Edwards et al. 2011; Hailer 2015; Kumar et al. 2017; Miller et al. 2012). Two of the most recent studies claim the most complicated hybrid ancestry for polar bears yet, invoking tales of “extensive” past hybridization events between the two species (Lan et al. 2022; Wang et al. 2022).
But does their interpretation of the genetic data represent reality or does it simply fit the authors’ preferred but false narrative that climate change is to blame for recent hybridization events and therefore likely to happen more often in a warmer world? And if, as I argue in my book, grizzly hybridization isn’t needed to explain polar bear evolutionary history, what does that say about similar claims that there has been a significant amount of Neanderthal interbreeding with humans in our past? Put another way, are geneticists everywhere going overboard with claims of interspecies hanky-panky?
Posted onJune 11, 2023|Comments Off on How grizzlies evolved into polar bears: The first book to tell the whole story is now available
Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Ariseis the fascinating story of the origin of polar bears. It reveals not just when and where the species came to be, but how it happened and why the bears were able to survive repeated cycles of sea ice change, some of unimaginable severity.
No other book like this exists. Despite decades of serving as an icon for the catastrophic climate change narrative, the polar bear has never had its evolutionary history explained so completely, never mind in a fully-referenced, plain-language style. And I couldn’t have done it without the financial help of my many supporters, so I thank you all again for your assistance in getting this important work completed.
The author of Polar Bear Evolution, Susan Crockford, is a good, credentialed scientist. Her writing is clear; her thinking is also. She has a broad understanding of biology and an informed paleo perspective. Crockford condenses a very large literature on polar bear biology and evolution in this book which will help readers understand the science related to the evolution of an Arctic species. Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is its synthesis of information from the fields of wildlife biology, molecular evolution, paleontology, and climate. Her original ideas and hypotheses on thyroid hormone’s role in evolution are very important and add a credible mechanism of phenotypic change which complements the literature on molecular genetic evolution. Polar Bear Evolution is an important contribution to science and its application in evolutionary biology and wildlife biology. Matthew A. Cronin, Ph.D.
Watch polar bear habitat reform in the Canadian Arctic: “last 10 days” Canadian Ice Service animation (works anytime) HERE.
See Quote archive for details.
polarbearscience 
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