Tag Archives: polar bear

Svalbard polar bear data for spring 2022, low June ice unlikely to affect health or survival

Posted on June 26, 2022 | Comments Off

Sea ice around Svalbard, Norway has receded dramatically over the last few weeks and is now at levels similar to 2018 and 2006. But the data are in for the 2022 spring season and they show the bears are still thriving.

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Barents Sea, body condtion, litter size, no sea ice, polar bear, Svalbard

New polar bear subpopulation update: more background facts and details from the paper

Posted on June 19, 2022 | Comments Off

Here are the facts you need to put into context the claim that the estimated 234 polar bears recently discovered in SE Greenland have been living ‘without sea ice‘.

The unique genetic isolation of this new subpopulation makes it one of the most interesting discoveries about polar bears we’ve seen in decades, yet the media were primed by a press release loaded with dooms-day climate rhetoric to focus exclusively on the model-predicted precarious future of the species, like this gem from the lead author:

“In a sense, these bears provide a glimpse into how Greenland’s bears may fare under future climate scenarios,” Laidre said. “The sea ice conditions in Southeast Greenland today resemble what’s predicted for Northeast Greenland by late this century.”

As a consequence, the media have been trying to out-do each other with the most over-the-top climate catastrophe headlines, see here and here. The authors of paper itself and a companion piece do the same: instead of focusing on the exciting scientific implications of the genetically isolated population they discovered, they promote the preferred narrative that polar bears have a bleak future and lecture the public (yet again) about the need for limiting CO2 emissions (Laidre et al. 2022; Peacock 2022).

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Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged climate change, extinction, fast ice, fjords, future, glaciers, new subpopulation, polar bear, SE Greenland, sea ice, Southeast Greenland, summer ice

Grizzly spotted on Western Hudson Bay shore but there are no polar bears on land for it to mate with

Posted on June 2, 2022 | Comments Off

On 28 May last week a big grizzly (probably a male) was spotted on the shore of Wapusk National Park just south of Churchill, Manitoba but unless he heads out onto the sea ice, he has no chance of finding a polar bear female to mate with. Even if he does, he is unlikely to find a polar bear female willing to mate: most polar bears mate late March to early May (Smith and Aars 2015). Brown bears (called grizzlies across most of North America) mate later in the year, from late May to July, which means finding hybrids here is highly unlikely.

A few tundra grizzlies from the Northwest Territories have been spotted moving southeast into the Hudson Bay area since 2008. There was some media-and-expert-generated excitement back in 2016 when a hunter shot what he thought might have been a grizzly/polar bear hybrid near Arviat but it turned out to be a blonde grizzly, which are not uncommon in the tundra population from which it came. A similar result came from recent genetic study: samples from two pale blonde grizzlies from the North Slope of Alaska that looked remarkably like polar bear hybrids were not only unrelated to each other but showed no evidence of being hybrids (Lan et al. 2016 Supplementary data, pg. 3).

Contrary to some predictions, grizzly/polar bear hybrids are still quite rare (Crockford 2018:23).

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Posted in Evolution, Hybridization, Sea ice habitat

Tagged brown bear, grizzly, hybrid, polar bear, range expansion

Polar bear habitat in Canada over the last decade: spring sea ice not in a death spiral

Posted on May 29, 2022 | Comments Off

Sea ice extent in Canada at the height of Arctic spring over the last 10 years has been more like a gentle roller coaster than a death spiral. See for yourself.

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Posted in Sea ice habitat

Tagged climate change, facts, global warming, polar bear, sea ice

Polynyas are critical for polar bear spring feeding

Posted on May 17, 2022 | Comments Off

Areas of open water or thin ice in spring are essential for the survival of Arctic species, as I emphasized in my recent peer-reviewed paper on polar bear ecology. Sea ice is still abundant in spring (April-June), which is the critical feeding period for polar bears: they must consume about 2/3 of the total calories they need for the entire year. Most of those calories come from newborn seals (ringed, bearded, and harp).

In southern areas, such as Hudson Bay and Davis Strait, virtually all of this feeding is completed by the end of May, making June a time of opportunistic hunting for most bears: if they find a seal, they will kill and eat it but if not, they can do without. That’s not just my opinion but the reason given by polar bear specialists themselves to explain why Southern Hudson Bay polar bear numbers had not declined in the 2000s despite a sudden increase in the ice-free season:

…even though break-up has advanced by up to 3-4 weeks in portions of Hudson Bay it still occurs no earlier than late June or early July so does not yet interfere with opportunities to feed on neonate ringed seal pups that are born in March-April in eastern Hudson Bay. Therefore, losing days or weeks of hunting opportunities during June and July deprives polar bears of the opportunity to feed on adult seals, but does not deprive them of the critical spring period when they are truly hyperphagic. [Obbard et al. 2016:29]

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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged hyperphagia, ice charts, newborn seals, polar bear, polynya, sea ice, spring feeding

Big announcement coming this week

Posted on May 1, 2022 | Comments Off

New peer-reviewed polar bear paper of mine coming out, likely Monday or Tuesday. Watch for it.

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Posted in Sea ice habitat, Summary

Tagged Pleistocene, polar bear, sea ice

Explaining abundant polar bear sightings on the East Coast as an upshot of sea ice loss is absurd

Posted on April 30, 2022 | Comments Off

Last week, a senior producer at CBC News, in order to concoct a timely story for ‘Earth Day’, attempted to explain the high number of sightings of polar bears this April in Newfoundland and Labrador, compared to the last two years, as a consequence of climate change and its handmaiden, loss of Arctic sea ice.

Title: ‘With an extinction threat looming, no wonder polar bears are at our door — and on the roof: there’s a grim reason why polar bears have been frequently showing up in coastal communities’. CBC News, 23 April 2022

The problem with this narrative is that the East Coast had much reduced sea ice in 2021 and virtually no polar bear sightings in Newfoundland and none in Labrador. There was more ice in 2020 than 2021 but also few bears. This year, ice extent was similar to 2020 for most of the region but polar bear sightings were up considerably.

In fact, the two years with the most sightings and problems with polar bears since 2008 were 2017 and 2018: in 2017, sea ice was exceptionally thick in April (although average in extent) and by June the sea ice was so thick and enduring that the Newfoundland fishing fleet couldn’t get out for spring openings; 2018 was another year of average sea ice extent and had even an even larger number of sightings than 2017, in Newfoundland especially (Crockford 2019:32). This suggests the sea ice vs. polar bear correlation on the East Coast since 2008 – if there even is one – may be the opposite of that stated in the CBC article: less ice usually means fewer bears onshore in Newfoundland and Labrador and more ice often means more bears.

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Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

Tagged attacks, correlation, David Strait, Labrador, Newfoundland, on the roof, polar bear, problem bears, sea ice

Whaling crews and their encounters with polar bears and sea ice in 17th century Svalbard

Posted on April 26, 2022 | Comments Off

A new paper published today by Dagomar Degroot is a long but interesting historical account about sea ice and whaling in the 1600s around Svalbard that includes some details on interactions of whalers with polar bears (Figure 4 from the paper copied below). These were the early days of whaling in the Arctic: the wholesale slaughter of whales and polar bears didn’t happen until the 1800s.

The paper is open access, so free to download but I’ve copied the abstract and a short excerpt here.

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Posted in History, hunting, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

Tagged 17th century, Barents Sea, bowhead whales, polar bear, sea ice, Svalbard, whalers

More fat polar bear sightings around homes on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula

Posted on April 12, 2022 | Comments Off

Two recent incidents really remind me of the opening scene in my polar bear attack thriller, EATEN, and this time both were captured on film. They involved bears in good physical condition and luckily, no one has been hurt. There is still sea ice off the Northern Peninsula, which has brought the bears from the north.

On Sunday (10 April) in St. Anthony, a woman was alerted by her dog to what she though was someone on the front porch and found herself literally face to face with a polar bear when she opened the door; it then hopped up on her roof. The next day, in Goose Cove, a woman watched two bears (probably a female with a two year old male cub) explore the outside of a neighbour’s house and then walk across her driveway.

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Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

Tagged fat bears, Goose Cove, Newfoundland, Northern Peninsula, polar bear, sea ice, spring, St. Anthony

Another polar bear on Fogo, this time on the south shore as sea ice surrounds the island

Posted on April 10, 2022 | Comments Off

On Friday, 8 April, a polar bear was photographed on the south coast of Fogo Island, Newfoundland at a time when sea ice surrounded the offshore island. The bear, spotted near North Side Road near Stag Harbour, was non-threatening to the point of being totally chilled out, but attracted enough human attention to cause traffic congestion. Another sighting a little more than a week ago near Tilting on the east side of the island could possibly have involved the same bear.