Category Archives: Guest post

Guest Post: Invasive Research is Alive and Well in Canada

This is a guest post by Kelsey Eliasson, who blogs at Polarbearalley, with his thoughts on the issue of the invasive research involved in polar bear mark-recapture studies around Churchill, Manitoba — which, as you’ll see, is a far different situation than I described for Nunavut (previous posts here, here, and here on this topic. Map below to get you oriented).

Kelsey is a writer, artist and polar bear guide who has spent 14 bear seasons watching the polar bears of Churchill. For five years, he ran Churchill’s monthly newspaper published occasionally, the Hudson Bay Post. Currently, he divides his year between the Yukon, Churchill and, occasionally, Riverton, home of Manitoba’s largest moose statue.

Churchill is in the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation, governed by the Province of Manitoba, while the community of Arviat, also in 'Western Hudson Bay' is overseen by the Government of Nunavut.

Churchill lies in the Western Hudson Bay (WHB) polar bear subpopulation, governed by the Province of Manitoba, while the community of Arviat, also in the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation, is overseen by the Government of Nunavut – different governments, different rules – as Kelsey points out below.

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Invasive Research is Alive and Well in Canada, by Kelsey Eliasson

The recent post about Foxe Basin was of particular interest to me, as I have been following the growing gap between the north and science for some time now. The stance taken by the Inuit is viewed as an inspiration by the guides over here in Churchill. For many years, we have tried to voice our deep concerns over the levels of handling and drugging that our bears (the Western Hudson Bay population) are subjected to on an annual basis.

This time last year, I tried to raise the topic for discussion after Andrew Derocher announced that ‘everything was on the table’ including feeding bears. At that time, the top polar bear researchers had sat down to discuss options for saving bears – except reducing handling and research – i.e. chasing bears down by helicopter and then shooting them with tranquilizers. Continue reading

Guest post: How ‘science’ counts bears

This essay by Dr. Jim Steele, professor emeritus, San Francisco State University, is reblogged from a July 3 2013 post at WUWT post, with Dr. Steele’s permission. I am not a field biologist and have never done a mark-recapture study but Dr. Steele has. His perspective on the way polar bear biologists count bears and estimate survival in the Southern Beaufort is a perfect companion to yesterday’s post, a related post that I’ll put up later this week, and this one from December, among others. I’ve added links to the references cited in this essay where they are available, as is my custom. See the original post for Jim’s responses to comments and questions.

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Guest post by Jim Steele   “How ‘science’ counts bears”

The Inuit claim “it is the time of the most polar bears.” By synthesizing their community’s observations they have demonstrated a greater accuracy counting Bowhead whales and polar bears than the models of credentialed scientists. To estimate correctly, it takes a village. In contrast the “mark and recapture” study, which claimed the polar bears along South Beaufort Sea were victims of catastrophic global warming and threatened with extinction, relied on the subjective decisions of a handful of modelers.

In mark and recapture studies, the estimate of population abundance is skewed by the estimate of survival. For example, acknowledging the great uncertainty in his calculations of survival, in his earlier studies polar beat expert Steven Amstrup reported three different population estimates for bears along the South Beaufort Sea. If he assumed the adult bears had an 82% chance of surviving into the next year, the models calculated there were 1301 bears. If survivorship was 88%, the abundance climbed to 1776 bears. If he estimated survivorship at a more robust 94%, then polar bear abundance climbed to 2490.1 Thus depending on estimated survival rates, a mark-and-recapture study may conclude that the population has doubled, or that it has suddenly crashed.

Here are the simplified basics of estimating survival.

Continue reading