HALF THE BATTLE?

When I was studying Environmental Communication (it was maybe a 200-level course in undergrad, back in the 2000s) we talked about the great problem with climate change, from a communication standpoint, being that it was so slow moving and effectively invisible. And one of the remedies to that was seen as the adoption of the highly charismatic and imperiled polar bear as a symbol. Famous commercials, investigations, news articles, and documentary films and TV series highlighting the plight of this most mega of fauna soon became popular.

MAKING A TERRIBLE CASE

Right at the outset major media outlets, broadcasters, and celebrated documentarians were caught misrepresenting the case. Most popularly, in 2017 National Geographic gifted us a story from Canada showing brutal images of a starving polar bear near Baffin Island. The animal’s ill health was said to be a no clearer or more direct sign of the impact of our warming oceans. It took a Nunavut bear monitor, Leo Ikakhik, to correct the record, explaining to folks from the south that there was no reason to suspect any one cause and that it was just as likely old age, injury, disease, or climate related issues, or some combination of all of the above, responsible for the animal’s sorry state. Ikakhik also recounted for the Canadian public how the community came across a similar bear just recently, one with a broken paw who was unable to hunt, and how they were compelled to put the suffering creature down. National Geographic was eventually forced to admit (behind their paywall) that they knew nothing about the bear or its situation, “went too far,” and also “lost control of the narrative.”

Just a couple years later, in 2019, the BBC and David Attenborough aired their series Seven Worlds, One Planet. In it the acclaimed presenter and explainer of all things natural shared with viewers images of polar bears hunting beluga whales in the ice-free summertime. This was framed as novel and desperate behaviour only exhibited due to a lack of sea ice for which climate change (and thus anthropogenic CO₂) was solely responsible. Sir David specifically offers "This extraordinary behaviour has only been recorded here, in this remote corner of North America, and only in the last few years."

It is certainly amazing behaviour to witness. But, contrary to this authoritative insistence, experts eagerly refuted the claim showing healthy, well-fed commonly engaging in this same behaviour, with documentation from the Hudson Bay area going back forty or fifty years. If there's any doubt, the BBC and Attenborough didn't need to be told. The first journal article that pops up when I Google "predation of belugas by polar bears" was published about findings on the subject from the 1980s. The very next on the list are another pair on the same topic published in '76 and '73, with one more from the same time citing still more sources:

• Kleinenberg et al. from 1964, offering that in the Eurasian Arctic, "attacks on beluga by single bears are quite frequent" and that when "a single bear discovers a pod of trapped whales it remains nearby and successively kills them (up to 13 are reliably reported)"; and

  
  

• Degerbøl & Freuchen in Mammals (Volume II, No. 4-5), published in 1935 in their series Report on the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-1924) including their observation that "a small flock of bears will congregate and kill a small whale, which they will then drag up on the ice and eat."

  
  

So, far from being aberrant behaviour or newly observed, this looks more like exactly what you can expect polar bears all over the planet get up to — and clearly not only observed but spelled out in publications for at least a century.

THE EXISTING DATA

Knowing these cases, more recently I went looking for more information on what we know about polar bear populations and their well-being or lack thereof. I wrote about that in 2021 in a brief offering titled Species [Not] At Risk. There, I highlighted how:

According to the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group and the WWF, we have little or no data for nine of nineteen major polar bear populations, such as those in parts of Russia, Eastern Greenland, and the Arctic Basin. More problematic still, the data we do have, compiled at the IUCN, suggests the vast majority of known populations to be healthy. Seven of ten populations, including many of the largest populations, each of which has several thousand members, are stable. Worse for the running narrative, of the remaining three populations two are growing and only one is showing signs of decline.

I thought that was interesting and went on to highlight the remarkable recovery, with loads of hard work by dedicated individuals and organizations all over the globe, we've seen with the dramatic return of the humpback whale, bison, grey wolf, bald eagle, and peregrine falcon.

NEW DATA - THE SVALBARD POPULATION

Well, a new assessment of the state of one population of polar bears just landed. The team, Aars et al., noted that “Climate change has impacted species and ecosystems worldwide” and that “Over the past decades, the increase in air temperature has been two to four times higher in the Arctic … compared to the global average.” With that they tell us the Barents Sea region has experienced even greater temperature rises than other Arctic zones and that this area has also lost sea ice habitat at twice the rate of any of the other areas hosting polar bear populations.

They then explain how sea ice loss has had significant impacts on the diets of polar bears in the Svalbard region of Norway as well as on how they make use of space. We are told bears in the region now swim longer distances than in previous generations, due to the absence of ice, and how this is hugely demanding energetically.

With that context and looking at more than 20 years of data on the body condition of these animals, the researchers spell out how they “predicted that body condition in adults would decline over time and that bears would be leaner in years with less available sea ice or in the spring following such years.” So, what did they find? The opposite. “However,” they explain, “sea ice loss did not lead to a reduction in [body condition] among adult [Barents Sea] polar bears. Rather, after around 2000, following an initial negative trend from 1995, both males, and females of different reproductive categories, increased in body condition for the following two decades” when sea ice loss was the worst on record. They go on to report:

We did not provide a clearer understanding of the relationship between climatic indexes and sea ice habitat, and failed to find evidence for how habitat loss may negatively affect the condition of polar bears. Thus, our findings contrast with reports from other populations where loss of sea ice has had clear negative effects on polar bear condition, growth, or demography, in particular from Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort Sea, as well as current and predicted effects of polar bears in the Baffin Bay area. However, our findings fit in with results from the Chukchi Sea area where bears are still in good condition despite less sea ice, explained by a very high biomass productivity including high densities of seals, a large continental shelf area, and the duration of sea ice over the shelf.

So, yeah. As ever, knowing anything at all remains the whole battle.