Scott Schliebe / USFWS
Ice-loving mammals may be on the brink of tough times throughout the Arctic. But people are beginning to take action, with scientists launching studies.
A series of public meetings are underway to gather comments on the proposal to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The first was held March 1 in Anchorage.
Update:More than 200 people traveled to the Anchorage library to listen to federal bioloigists describe the ESA listing process and what’s known about the status of polar bears. Something like 300,000 comments have already been received by the agency on the move to offer the bears protection under the act.
While many comments applauded the proposal as an essential first-step to make sure polar bears survive global warming, others told the agency that a threatened listing would do nothing to help the species and could cause unintended economic damage to the state of Alaska and to certain Canadian villages.
A contingent of Canadian Native hunters and subsistence villagers urged the agency to not list bears as threatened, arguing that existing treaties and programs offer the enough protection. A representative of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also expressed skepticism that scientific evidence has actually damned the bears to slow decline.
But others applauded the proposal. The retreat of sea ice clearly amounts to broad destruction of the bears’ critical habitat, they said, and warrants ESA protection.
The rationale behind the listing? Polar bears may suffer a catastrophic loss of habitat if summer sea ice shrinks as projected by most climate models. Imagine rolling up the forest and foothills that support a population of brown bears, forcing the animals to forage only along the edges.
Alert polar bear / USFWS
Bear scientists have long been warning about the impact of sea ice retreat on polar bear health and populations, and conservation groups have made it a rallying cause in their campaigns to raise awareness over climate change.
With sea ice retreating hundreds of miles from shore, over deeper water that might support fewer seals, polar bears will have to work harder to find enough to eat. With thinner ice underfoot, female polar bears have been digging more dens on land. Scientists have reported finding instances where male polar bears stalked and consumed adult females — something never observed before. Several bears have been spotted dead in the water, drowned during a storm while trying to swim to ice floes. There has been lower cub survival in fall, increased rate of births in spring, shifts in behavior and time spent on land.
These early signs of a pending biological crisis has triggered a series of reports and legal actions.
In the winter of 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the bears under the ESA because of sea ice thinning and summer retreat. In June, 2005, the polar bear specialist group of the World Conservation Union rated the Arctic’s top predator as vulnerable on an international “Red List” of threatened species after concluding populations could crash by 30 percent over the next 35 to 50 years.
That December, CBD was joined by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace in a suit to force the agency to give the species protection under the ESA, saying that the bears could go extinct within a generation or two if people didn’t take action.
A year later, on Dec. 27, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the agency would propose listing the bears as threatened under the ESA and spend the next 12 months gathering data and information. People have until April 9 to comment. The hearings in Anchorage, Washington and Barrow are part of that process.
Walrus need ice too
Polar bears aren’t the only animals facing problems in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, off the Arctic coast of Alaska. Walruses ride the sea ice to reach foraging sites on the sea floor.
Walrus family / USFWS
“Walruses use sea ice sort of like a conveyor belt,” Tim Ragen, executive director of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, told people during a climate impact session at the Alaska Forum for the Environment.
“As it moves along, they go with it and it takes them over feeding areas. What happens if you don’t have resting platforms, i.e., ice, to get access to these different places?”
Sometimes, baby walruses die.
Biologist Carin Ashjian documented baby walruses abandoned by their mothers when she conducted Beaufort Sea research aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy in 2004. The disturbing observations were widely reported that summer by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Ashjian’s home base.
AP writer Dan Joling has written a walrus update, published by the Anchorae Daily News. The story bundles together older material from Ashian with fresh discussion by Brendan Kelly, a long-time University of Alaska Fairbanks walrus researcher now working as the National Science Foundation’s Arctic National Sciences program manager.
The story is worth checking out for Kelly’s insights. An excerpt:
“Basically, this ice edge is typically lying over relatively shallow continental shelf waters. That’s really important if you’re a benthic feeder, if you feed on clams and snails and things that live down on the bottom, which walruses do. So by using this ice edge in the summer and fall, the females have access to food directly below them, but they can nurse their calves up on the ice. So they split their time between nursing their young on the ice and diving down to the bottom so to provision themselves.
“What we’ve seen in recent years with these extreme ice retreats is that the ice is going north of the continental shelf and takes the nursing habitat over water that’s really too deep for the females to feed.”