Update to 18 Jan 2017 post: For at least 10 days, officials in Longyearbyen, Svalbard have been trying to keep a particularly persistent female polar bear and her two cubs away from the community. After being chased away last week, Sunday night (22 Jan) the trio appeared again at dog kennels at the edge of town but this time, but this time officials drove them even further south.
Comments Off on Polar bears onshore in Svalbard update: bears again run out of Longyearbyen
Posted in Polar bear attacks
Tagged attack, facts, Longyearbyen, onshore, polar bear, sightings, Svalbard, weight loss, winter
Recent media hype over swimming polar bears in the Southern Beaufort has been quite spectacular (still going strong today at the Washington Post here) but a close look at relevant data shows the message is bogus. Researchers admit (in their methods section) they couldn’t tell if bears said to have swum “non-stop” actually hauled out for half a day or more to rest on small ice flows invisible to satellites and astonishingly, the bear getting all the media attention – who swam the longest of any bear – lost less weight than a bear would have done simply sitting on shore for the same length of time.
Comments Off on Longest-swimming polar bear lost less weight than if she had stayed onshore
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Beaufort Sea, claims, facts, Hudson Bay, longest swim, media hype, melting ice, misinformation, non-stop swims, polar bear, sea ice, swimming, weight loss, without rest
In what looks like a follow-up to last week’s CBC documentary, The Politics of Polar Bears, the London (UK) based DailyMail published interviews with polar bear biologists Mitch Taylor and Andrew Derocher (September 9, 2014).
The CBC film did have a “one scientist vs. another” flavor about it and this article definitely echoes that approach. My comments below on Derocher’s insinuations and questions about starving bears and global warming.
Continue reading
Comments Off on Andrew Derocher raises the “starving polar bears” issue in DailyMail interview
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged caribou, conservation, DailyMail, Derocher, fasting, goose eggs, Gormezano, ice-free season, Mitch Taylor, polar bears, Rockwell, sea ice, sea ice decline, starving, survival, terrestrial foods, weight loss, western hudson bay
You must be logged in to post a comment.