Tag Archives: population size

‘Species-threatening’ population declines vs. polar bear declines

Posted on December 16, 2012 | Comments Off on ‘Species-threatening’ population declines vs. polar bear declines

In 2008, polar bears in the United States were declared ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act (USFWS 2008). The IUCN (to which the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) belongs) lists the polar bear as “vulnerable” (IUCN Red List 2012). In Canada (where 60% of the world’s polar bears reside), the polar bear is listed as a ‘species of special concern’ (COSEWIC 2008:iii).

As Jonathan Adler pointed out in an excellent article that appeared on the heels of the American ESA listing decision (Adler 2008:112), “Insofar as the listing is based upon climate models, ice-melt projections, and assumptions about the effects of habitat loss on the bear’s prospects for survival in the wild, its scientific basis is quite speculative.” These are also, as I understand it, unprecedented criteria for ESA listing – no other species has been listed as endangered or threatened based on such speculation of future conditions.

So what do actual polar bear population declines look like?

The Western Hudson Bay, Canada (WHB) subpopulation is the only one that has recently declined by a statistically-significant amount. [see previous post here on the status numbers] The WHB polar bear subpopulation makes up 3-5% of the global total for the species, currently estimated at 20,000-25,000 animals.

In this post, I’ll compare the documented WHB population decline to the declines seen in a few truly endangered animals, just to put the much-bandied about numbers into some perspective. Continue reading

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Polar bears are distributed throughout their available habitat

Posted on November 28, 2012 | Comments Off on Polar bears are distributed throughout their available habitat

All Arctic sea ice habitats that are currently suitable for polar bears have polar bears living in them 1 – even the southern-most regions of Hudson Bay that are well below the Arctic Circle (see previous post on polar bear numbers here).

Have a look at the maps below and see how well the current maximum extent of sea ice correlates with the present range of polar bears around the Arctic.

Fig. 1. Sea ice extent at April 25, 2012, from NSIDC (the winter maximum). Note that although there is sea ice in the Sea of Okhotsk (top right of the map), polar bears do not currently live there nor is there any evidence they ever did1.
Compare to the polar bear’s official range below.

Fig. 2. The global range of the polar bear, showing the 19 regional subpopulations. Map from Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG), with a few extra labels added.

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Population size estimates for grizzly bears in British Columbia, Canada

Posted on October 22, 2012 | Comments Off on Population size estimates for grizzly bears in British Columbia, Canada

This is a follow-up to my last post, which summarized IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) polar bear population estimates and status reports, here.

I was interested to see how the PBSG population estimates compared to similar studies in other animals, so I took a look at the official 2012 population estimate for grizzly bears in British Columbia, Canada here. A couple of brief excerpts are provided below.

British Columbia is the western-most province of Canada (Fig. 1). It is roughly half the size of Greenland, while sea ice habitat of polar bears is roughly 6-7x the area of Greenland.

Just nine pages long, this grizzly bear population report is short, clear and unambiguous. While it may perhaps not explain its methods in enough detail for some folks (and it is, admittedly, a small portion of global grizzly bear territory), the report is nevertheless clear about the variations in quality of population estimates over time (which began in the 1970s and so are similar to what we have for polar bears). The report is also clear about how these historical estimates impact the current population status and trend. See Fig. 2 and 3 below for short excerpts.

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PBSG polar bear population assessment made simple

Posted on October 21, 2012 | Comments Off on PBSG polar bear population assessment made simple

[Update: Feb. 10 2013. I have corrected an oversight in the summary tables – the originals neglected to indicate that the Barents Sea subpopulation is shared between Norway and Russia (not controlled by Norway alone). Here is revised Table 1 and revised Table 2. ]

[Update 2: Sept. 26, 2013. See “Global population of polar bears has increased by 2,650-5,700 since 2001″ for further insight. I have also made slight corrections to the tables below, now marked Version 3.]

A couple of weeks ago, a news report appeared highlighting an interview with Russian biologist Nikita Ovsyannikov, deputy director of Russia’s polar bear reserve on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea. This is what the news report said:

“He [Ovsyannikov] guessed the number of bears around the Chukchi Sea, which also sometimes migrate in small numbers to western Alaska, had dropped over the past three decades from “about 4,000 to no more than 1,700 at best.”

See Kelsey’s comments over at Polar Bear Alley and the comment I left there, here and my related previous post here

This media focus on Chukchi Sea polar bear numbers caught my attention because I had recently spent some time going through the 15 Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) meeting reports in an effort to summarize the population estimates they provided. This international group first met in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1965 to advance and coordinate polar bear research and conservation under the auspices of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Species Survival Commission (SSC). I knew that according to the PBSG, the population of the Chukchi Sea is zero – that is, no Chukchi bears are included in the official total of 20,000-25,000 bears because no reliable survey had ever been done. Ovsyannikov’s statement to the press encouraged me to finish my summary of the population estimates in the PBSG meeting report tables.

This was not an easy task, in part due to the virtually constant changes in presentation style and format in the tables used to present the data (which appeared first in the 1981 report). For example, even between the 14th (2005) and 15th (2009) meeting reports, the population data table presents the subpopulations in different order and swaps the position of two critical columns (“status” and “observed or predicted trend”), making it extremely difficult for readers to do a quick comparison between years.

So I simplified the 2009 table (the most recent available), leaving out the future predictions as irrelevant to questions about current status. I included some population estimates and status assessments from previous reports to show the changes over time (where available). The full summary table, designated Table 1,  is provided here as a pdf. [update 2013 – this is Version 3]. However, in this format, it still spans two pages, so I composed another  table that contains the 2009 status information only (2009 is the most recent available), see Table 2, version 3 below. Viewing the data this way may surprise you.

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Western Hudson Bay polar bears are not like the others – Part 2

Posted on October 5, 2012 | Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bears are not like the others – Part 2

In Part 1 of the Western Hudson Bay (WHB) polar bear story, I promised to explore the idea that rather than declining due to the effects of global warming, WHB polar bear populations may simply be returning to ‘normal’ after the rapid population increase that followed the intense over-harvests that occurred between 1890 and 1930 and again from 1945 to 1970.

Derocher and Stirling (1995:1664) had this to say about the life history features (like incidence of triplets and age of weaning) that made the polar bears of WHB unique:

“The results of our analyses suggest that the unique reproductive characteristics of polar bears in western Hudson Bay in the 1960s and 1970s were either a function of a population increasing from a depleted state and feeding on a relatively abundant prey base, or density-independent fluctuations in prey population size, or availability due to sea ice variation.“

In my last post, I discussed some of the evidence for how polar bear reproductive characteristics had changed since 1985. But how different were WHB polar bears, before and after 1985, from the other populations that had been dramatically reduced between 1890 and 1970, such as those in Svalbard/Barents Sea and Davis Strait?

There are two factors to consider in this recovery from over-harvest: population size changes and reproductive characteristics. Turns out, we don’t know much about the Davis Strait subpopulation but we do know a bit about Svalbard/Barents Sea bears since the 70s. And the Svalbard/Barents Sea vs. WHB comparison is a bit of an eye-opener.
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