Melting Ice Leaves Polar Bears Desperate For Any Food

Features:

With no sign of their usual prey - seals resting on the ice - this female and her two cubs are forced to swim for miles, then trudge across the Alaskan wilderness in search of a meal.

Read the whole story: Features

Comments

[realpolitic]

06:49 AM on 11/17/2009

"Polar bears face extinction in less than 70 years because of global warming, scientists have warned."

"Melting ice is causing their numbers to drop dramatically, they warn."

"Others also at risk include ivory gulls, Pacific walruses, ringed and hooded seals and narwhals, small whales with long, spiral tusks."

"One of the problems is that other animals are moving north, encroaching on their territory, spurred by increasing temperatures, pushing out native species."

"The animals are also struggling with the loss of sea ice."

"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," said Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University, who led the latest study, publied in the journal Science.

"Recent projections suggest polar bears could be extinct within 70 years.

"But we think this could be a very conservative estimate. The outlook is very bleak for them and other creatures such as ringed seals.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6167819/Polar-bears-face-extinction-in-less-than-70-years-because-of-global-warming.html

[Richard2]

11:06 PM on 11/17/2009

Be very afraid for those animals moving north into the Polar Bear's territory. Polar Bears are at the top of the food chain.

[realpolitic]

11:32 PM on 11/17/2009

A different breed of fox is moving there. You think the polar bears can catch them. You are not so funny and clever as you think. Polar bears eat manily ringed seals. They are not like grizzley's that eat a little of everything. But why I am talking to a brick wall?

[Richard2]

01:17 PM on 11/16/2009

The photo looks like Thanksgiving Dinner in the Arctic Circle. Guess we know what omnivorous means now.

[doriath22]

09:42 AM on 11/08/2009

Zis is ze sort of aggressif behavior typical of zezse nature documentaries. Ze whale corpse shtruggles, but to no avail....... (tahnks mister Cleese!)

[CommunistUtopia]

04:55 PM on 11/07/2009

This is pure fiction. Nobody actually believes this so you should stop wasting time with it.

[Squeezer55]

03:54 PM on 11/07/2009

I'm just as concerned about the future of the planet as anyone else but I have to take a contradictory stance here. I spent almost ten years working in the Canadian Arctic from Inuvik at the MacKenzie Delta east to Baffin Island . I worked on the Dew Line reclamation sites, diamond exploration and seismic exploration. The topic of polar bears being an analogy for the canary in the coal mine has been around for at least ten years so I discussed this with many of the Inuit including the elders. I never met one who thought polar bears were in danger . They were concerned about the caribou herds but not the polar bears. Several said that as far as they were concerned the polar bear population was increasing. One showed me a picture of a bear shot trying to climb through his aunt's bedroom window.
They had a poor opinion of university researchers coming up in the summer, staying 4-5 weeks and going back south as self proclaimed experts. They took great delight in bullshitting the southerners and seeing how much BS these educated people would accept.
Call me naive but I think I'm going to believe the people who live with the polar bears instead of the alarmists who populate the ivory towers of academia.

[CommunistUtopia]

05:41 PM on 11/07/2009

You are just a polar bear hater. LOL

[Tom Payned]

04:13 AM on 11/07/2009

I think it's time for all the anti climate control wackos to prove to us there is no global warming & no wild life risk by taking an unarmed photo tour around the poles to document just how wonderful things are.

If they end up being eaten by the bears, well, two birds, one stone.

Of course, they'll never have the guts to do anything on the ground.

[CommunistUtopia]

05:42 PM on 11/07/2009

You should try and prove that this climate stuff exists.

[guinganbresil]

09:05 AM on 11/09/2009

Usually the burden of proof lies on those proposing the theory. They are expected to provide ways to demonstrate the theory FALSE, perform the tests, and show that the theory has NOT been disproven. Look at Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. He predicted all sorts of things that could DISPROVE his theory. The tests were done and it passed with flying colors.

If Climate Science is really a science with regard to CO2 AGW, they should provide tests that could DISPROVE the theory. Example: Outgoing long wave radiation should be DECREASING if the mechanism they are proposing is true. We should have satellite data to test this. If the Long wave outgoing radiation is INCREASING, then the CO2 cause of AGW is FALSE. End of story.

[jeffp26]

05:55 PM on 11/06/2009

I am disgusted by this, and hope these bears eat a certain Ms. Palin, and a certain Senator Inhofe from the grating state of Oklahoma.

[Quaoar]

06:55 PM on 11/07/2009

Turn them loose at a Tea Party and the hunger problem will be solved.

[Over40]

04:54 PM on 11/06/2009

If polar bears are truly starving ... can't food be airlifted to them by wildlife protection groups???

[Richard2]

03:33 PM on 11/06/2009

The photos show how adaptable polar bears are in their environment. They normally eat small living creatures, such as seals. Here they are eating the remains of a dead whale. If they were really starving, they would probably play dead, and then eat the sea gulls too.

[MagicalPossibilities]

02:28 PM on 11/06/2009

This is heartbreaking.

[ResidualSelfImage]

12:37 PM on 11/06/2009

Its called a sun cycle. Polar bears and penguins survived the last warming period.
They will survive this one too.

Mars polar caps have been melting too.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

[Exusian]

01:16 PM on 11/06/2009

Your self-image is highly inflated.

Yet another person who needs to learn how to follow a news story forward in time:
Mars Warming Due to Dust Storms, Study Finds
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070404-mars-warming.html

Better yet, if you want to accurate information on science, learn how to search in the scientific literature instead of popular media:
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=mars+warming&hl=en&btnG=Search

[jeffp26]

05:56 PM on 11/06/2009

And what will your grandchildren eat?

[Perry Clease]

01:46 PM on 11/07/2009

Soylent Green

[fumes]

12:02 PM on 11/06/2009

change.. the only constant:

"Predictions made over the last decade about the impacts of climate change on biodiversity may be exaggerated, according to a paper published in the journal Science. We need to determine what represents a “good” intervention to preserve animal habitats in the countryside and in towns and cities. Furthermore, we will increasingly see new ecosystems emerging as a result of climate changes and so what is “natural” is going to require a whole new definition." http://www.physorg.com/news176720553.html

[realpolitic]

06:31 PM on 11/06/2009

Yes, the new eco-system in the ocean will include a lot of sea weed and little else!

[fumes]

08:10 PM on 11/06/2009

but.. but.. rp..

these are your kind of folks: credible people from a credible venue..

Oxford University researchers, Professor Kathy Willis and Dr Shonil Bhagwat.

oh and say.. how 'bout them yanks..

[realpolitic]

05:42 PM on 11/07/2009

Yes, I did not look at it closely. The authors say, "They suggest that ‘we should expect to see species turnover, migrations, and novel communities, but not necessarily the levels of extinction previously predicted’."

"Although over three quarters of the earth’s deserts, grasslands, forests and tundra have changed because of human activity, the researchers say that even in this fragmented landscape species are surviving better than was previously predicted."

"Professor Kathy Willis, from the School for Geography and the Environment, expresses some caution about the apparent ability of species to survive in a more fragmented habitat. She said: ‘Presence or absence does not take into account lag effects of declining populations. Therefore, a more worrying interpretation is that the full effects of fragmentation will only be seen in future years.’"

"Furthermore, we will increasingly see new ecosystems emerging as a result of climate changes and so what is “natural” is going to require a whole new definition.'"

http://www.physorg.com/news176720553.html

The last statement is not necessarily optimistic. Fumes, there are always arguments within climate change and most science. However, few reputable folks doubt the consensus that anthropogenic co2 emissions is responsible for the warming.

[WilliePilgrim]

11:28 AM on 11/06/2009

If one ever sees a well fed population of polar bears, one is looking at an anomoly in the polar bear's usual natural history. Polar bears are famous for their ravenous appetites and are one of the few large terrestrial or marine mammal predators that wil, without hesitation, come right up and prey on just about anything it can, including other polar bears. Furthermore one of the most serious threats to the species is not the loss of ice, but rather the loss of their original habitat which up until commercial harvesting of bird-eggs and fish from the many shoals and small islands of the North Atlantic, used to reach down to the St Lawrence in the West and possibly as far south as the rookeries near the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar.
If the ice melts, it will mean a temporary loss of one of the polar bears' habitats but it will also mean a proliferation of seals and without ice a flourishing of plankton from the water's exposure to summer sun=plankton=fish=seals=polar bears, provided we don't commercially harvest it unwisely.
But first we need to be realistic about what we are dealing with and the current emotions regarding the polar bears instead of the integrity of the entire oceanic habitat is not very good.

[Chubbster]

11:22 AM on 11/06/2009

There are more polar bears alive on Earth right now than at any time before in history. An inconvenient fact.

[Exusian]

11:25 AM on 11/06/2009

No, an unsubstantiated assertion.

[DocSkull]

07:38 AM on 11/07/2009

You mean since we put restrictions on hunting them for sport because they were going extinct?

[bothsides]

11:05 AM on 11/06/2009

whites did this ruin our world thanks!

[Chubbster]

11:23 AM on 11/06/2009

Racists even here in a story about bears.