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Crawling into a Polar Bear Den
As a scientist and somewhat of an adventure-seeker, I’ve experienced a number of times in my life when curiosity outweighed my basic natural instincts to avoid danger. This leads me to do things that, when I step back, don’t make much rational sense. Staring into the mouth of a polar bear den yesterday, I felt that familiar feeling creep back.
As part of our ongoing maternal den study on Alaska’s North Slope, our team enters and measures snow dens after polar bear mom and cubs have left to hunt seals on the sea ice. We take every precaution to make sure that the bears are gone when we enter dens. But there is always the slight chance that the family hasn’t left or that another bear has moved in to escape the elements.
Seeing a polar bear in the wild is an amazing experience, but bumping into one in a claustrophobic den is nightmarish. Because we aren’t anxious to home-deliver a meal to a hungry bear, we are extremely cautious (and jittery) when we enter a den. Luckily, the mother bear and her cubs were long gone yesterday, leaving behind a pretty impressive den.
When a female polar bear digs a den in the late fall, she will search out the best possible snowdrift—one where she runs the lowest chance of being discovered by other bears. After digging in and settling down, she will then give birth to her cubs, and they will spend the next couple months feeding and resting.
That being said, after exploring a polar bear den, it quickly becomes apparent that resting is not all that’s going on! In the den that we just explored, the cubs had done a fair amount of digging. They had excavated a few smaller chambers, tunnels, and even tore into the tundra itself. Industrious little buggers.
It’s easy to imagine a frustrated mom being cooped up under the snow with a couple of rambunctious balls of white fluff. This helps explain why mother bears tend to look so relieved when they emerge for the first time in the spring and finally have a minute to themselves.
Squeezing through the den and its different chambers yesterday, I was again struck with a deep appreciation for a creature that has somehow evolved to live in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. It’s hard to picture the cramped darkness that pregnant and nursing bears call home for months. It helps you comprehend why female bears are so protective of the young that they have fought so hard to bring through their first winter.
The whole process occurs in complete isolation and on the verge of starvation. It’s an incredible lesson about sacrifice that we can glean from the natural world, and one that is important to me on a scientific level and in a very personal way as well.
Why it may be time to stop using the polar bear as a symbol of the climate crisis
A lone in the Arctic, surrounded by disappearing sea ice … few fables of the climate crisis are better known than the plight of the polar bear. The marine mammals are heavily dependent on sea ice for hunting, and as the Arctic warms, scientists warn they will become extinct across much of the region.
Long term declines have already been recorded in three of the 19 polar bear subpopulations found across the Arctic, including those in the western part of Hudson Bay in Canada – among the most southerly populations – whose numbers dropped from an estimated 842 to 618 between 2016 and 2021.
But some researchers warn that this “accidental” symbol of the climate crisis is unhelpful and not universally true so far, and can undermine conservation efforts by driving mistrust with some Indigenous communities in the Arctic. They say other species are better suited as symbols of wildlife threatened by a warming world.
“It’s easier to tell the public simple stories: the sea ice is melting so polar bears are doing worse. But biology and ecology are very complicated,” says Prof Jon Aars, who has been leading polar bear research at the Norwegian Polar Institute on Svalbard since 2003.
The Norwegian archipelago is the most rapidly warming part of planet Earth. Temperatures there have risen 4C on average in the past 50 years and a massive amount of sea ice has disappeared, raising fears for the survival of the 300 bears that are based there, part of a wider Barents Sea population of around 3,000 between Svalbard and the Franz Josef Land islands in Russia.
Despite this dramatic change in conditions, however, the polar bear population on Svalbard has yet to experience a decline. This could be because the mammals are still recovering from the pressures of hunting, which was banned in Norway in 1973, and Aars does not rule out a future collapse. There is growing evidence that the bears are switching hunting practices – targeting reindeer as well as seals, a change that was first documented on the archipelago in 2021. “Denning” – behaviour around making dens – has changed and bears are swimming long distances, but, says Aars, there is still enough sea ice in the spring for the bears to hunt successfully.
It’s easier to tell the public simple stories: the sea ice is melting so polar bears are doing worse
Prof Jon Aars, Norwegian Polar Institute
“I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that polar bears do so well in Svalbard because the changes have been so big. They have three to four months’ less sea ice now than three decades ago on average, which is a lot. If someone told us 20 to 30 years ago that the ice would be in this situation, most of us would have guessed that polar bears would have done worse than they’re actually doing,” he says.
The complicated global perspective of the estimated 26,000 wild polar bears – which has big data gaps in Russia and parts of Greenland – has much to do with types of sea ice, which are grouped into four ecoregions – seasonal, divergent, convergent and archipelago – according to Dr Steven Amstrup, chief scientist emeritus at Polar Bears International. In Hudson Bay, where the ice is seasonal, longer fasting periods are forcing bears to come on shore, where there is little to eat.
In Svalbard, the ice moves away from the shore in summer, creating a divergent ecoregion where the picture is uncertain. The Norwegian archipelago is surrounded by the rich waters of a continental shelf and in spring – the crucial hunting season for polar bears – there is enough coverage for them to find seal pups. In the Beaufort Sea near Alaska, which is also in the divergent group, however, where the waters are among the least productive in the Arctic and support fewer seals, the polar bear populations are struggling.
“We can’t talk about a global state of the bears [because of the data gaps],” says Prof Andrew Derocher, a polar bear expert at the University of Alberta, who authored some of the early studies about the effect of climate change on polar bears. “You have to take a more subpopulation perspective. Some are doing well, some are not. This creates a lot of confusion working with Inuit hunters in Canada who say they’re seeing lots of bears. I say, ‘Yes, because you live in an area where there are lots of bears but there are other places where they are not doing as well’.”
Last year, the situation was further complicated with the discovery of what appears to be a 20th isolated subpopulation in Greenland that has adapted to use ice from glaciers to aid hunting.
“In the Canadian context, the polar bear being a symbol of climate change has caused a lot of problems,” Derocher says. “We used to have a good relationship with Inuit hunters. A lot of the hunters that I know think that polar bears will do OK with climate change and it has created some interesting tensions.”
Although Derocher is pessimistic about the future for many subpopulations, including the bears in Svalbard, he says: “We’ve got areas of polar bear distribution that are going to be quite robust to the effects of climate change. I always say polar bears are an accidental icon of climate change. It’s not a ‘skies falling’ scenario or Chicken Little time. But what we have to do is look at our trajectories decades into the future.”
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The ‘Bubbles’ panel is intended to extend the image for use on multi-panel (2 or more) installations, with the Polar Bear as the main panel image.
Polar Bear image – 1200mm and wider.
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If you would like the Polar Bear image flipped from left to right compared to the original image, please just get in touch with us prior to ordering and we can do this for you.
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TYPICAL SHOWER PANEL FORMATS WE CAN SUPPLY:
- 3mm Composite material.
- Easy to fit for competent DIY – full fitting instructions supplied.
- Ideal for shower panels in a shower enclosure or above the bath – a fantastic alternative to tiles.
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NOTE
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