POLAR BEARS, HUMANS. CONSERVATION: CLIMATE CHANGE, POLLUTION, TOURISM

POLAR BEAR CONSERVATION

There are 22,000 to 31,000 polar bears in 19 populations across the Arctic in Canada, Greenland, Alaska, Norway and Russia. They are not endangered. Around 60 to 80 percent of polar bears live in Canada. On the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List they are listed as Vulnerable; US Federal List: classifies them as Threatened. In CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild) they are in Appendix II, which lists species not necessarily threatened with extinction now but that may become so unless trade is closely controlled. [Source: Aren Gunderson, Animal Diversity Web (ADW) |=|]

Polar bear populations considered to be stable but are declining in some areas but growing in other. In 1993, the estimated world population was 21,470 to 28,370 bears. In 1972, the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited all hunting, except for subsistence, of polar bears in the U.S. In 1973 the United States, Russia, Norway, Canada, and Denmark signed an agreement to protect polar bear habitat, limit hunting, and cooperate on research. In Greenland and Norway, the World Wildlife Foundation lists polar bears as vulnerable. In Russia, they’re rare or recovering, depending on the location, and in Alaska, polar bears are threatened. In Canada, they’re a species of special concern, [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

In 1973, Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears requires the five signatory countries (the Range States) to restrict the taking of polar bears and manage polar bear subpopulations in accordance with sound conservation practices based on the best available scientific data. According to a report on polar bear attacks: It also allows harvest by local people using traditional methods in the exercise of their traditional rights and in accordance with the laws of the Agreement. Subsequent to 1973, measures implemented by the Range States, such as increased research and monitoring, cooperative harvest management programs, and establishment of protected areas, were presumed to have either stabilized, or led to the recovery of, subpopulations that had experienced excessive unregulated harvest. Today, polar bears are legally harvested by Indigenous peoples in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, and harvest levels in most subpopulations are well managed and occur at a rate that does not have a negative effect on population viability. However, polar bears now face a new and unprecedented threat due to the effects of climate change on their sea ice habitat. Although the current status of polar bear sub-populations is variable, all polar bears depend on sea ice for fundamental aspects of their life history, including access to their primary prey, ice seals. [Source: “Polar bear attacks on humans: Implications of a changing climate” by James Wilder, U.S. Forest Service; Dag Vongraven, Norwegian Polar Institute; Todd C. Atwood, United States Geological Survey, Wildlife Society, July 2, 2017]

Polar bears are a keystone species, meaning their presence or absence strongly affects populations of other species in the area where they live. They are a top carnivores of the Arctic. The remains of seal kills left unconsumed by bears are likely an important source of food for younger, less-experienced polar bears and for Arctic foxes. Humans and other polar bears are the only predators of Polar bears. Male polar bears may prey on cubs if they come into contact. Females with cubs tend to avoid other bears for this reason.

Polar bears have become poster animals for the environmental movement. The WWF has called them “an ambassador for Arctic nature and a symbol of the of the impacts that climate change is increasingly having around the world.” A conservation program that began in the 1960s when bears became overhunted is credited with saving the bears from becoming endangered. Norway and the Soviet Union banned the hunting of polar bears. Canada introduced a quota system and the United States and Denmark (for Greenland) allowed only indigenous people to hunt the bears. Canada and Norway have created reserves to protect bear habitats and denning areas.

Threats to Polar Bears

Starving polar bear in Svalbard, Norway

The biggest threats to polar bears are climate change, pollution and energy development. Polar bears have been hunted, both by indigenous and non- indigenous peoples, for their coats, meat and other items. Stuffed polar bears have been a popular trophy. Commercial and sport hunting of polar bears increased in the 1900s as the price of pelts reached as much as $3000. Protection and hunting prohibitions have lead a an increase in polar bear populations. Their low reproductive rates and large ranges make them vulnerable to threats from human beings.

Polar bears are suffering greatly as a result of climate change melting the ice which is so vital to their survival. Climate change has caused a decline in sea ice, giving polar bears less access to their favored prey and increasing the risk of malnutrition and starvation. Less sea ice also means that the bears must spend more time on land, increasing conflicts with humans. See Below

In December 2023, the death of a polar bear in Alaska due to bird flu, was reported. Polar bears could be catching bird flu after feasting on bird carcasses infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of birdflu. It was the first documented case of a polar bear dying from this virus, highlighting the vulnerability of this already threatened species to emerging diseases.

Polar Bears and Humans

Polar bears have no natural predators other than humans. Humans have utilized polar bears for food, medicine, ecotourism and drug research. Native people of the Arctic have historically hunted them for fur, meat, and medicines. Hunting by those groups is still allowed in the United States, Canada, and Greenland (Denmark). Trophy and commercial hunters have taken bears for pelts that sold for $3000 in the past. |=|

1922 French ad

The Inuit (Eskimos) have hunted polar bears for their pelts for centuries. The call the animals “nanuk”, a word that conveys a great deal of respect. Polar bears were a prize possession of medieval kings in Europe and their white fur was treasured as far away as Egypt. In the 18th century, scientists named the bear “Ursus maritimus” ("sea bear"). In Norway polar bear pelts are spread before altars at cathedrals to keep the clerics feet warm while they are celebrating mass.[Source: John Eliot, National Geographic, January, 1998; Thor Larsen, National Geographic. April 1971]

Polar bears are popular zoo animals and have been featured in circuses and are show up in art, folklore, religion and modern culture. Richard Davids had himself placed in a cage among polar bears, sort of like a tourist in a shark cage. He wrote, "They didn't seem to consider me a possible meal; rather they seemed eager for companionship." One put his nose up the cage, "When I tapped his nose he quickly withdrew and gave me what looked like a hurt look, as if I had betrayed him." Another lay down next to the cage like a lap dog and went to sleep.

There are now so many polar bears on some of the Svalbard islands that tourists are advised to carry guns. After Norway banned the hunting of polar bears in 1973, their population doubled to 2,000 with a few years. In the 1990s, tourists with no weapons training could rent a rifle for about $10 a day. The guns made local people nervous. One biologist told AP, "The odds of getting shot by a tourist are now greater than of getting attacked by a bear.'

Humans Hunting Polar Bear

In the old days polar bears were hunted with spears, lances and dogs. The hunts were a test of manhood, a view kept alive by Eskimos even with modern weapons. In Thule, Greenland, a man wasn't considered worthy of marrying the daughter of a great hunter until he has killed his first bear.

According to the report on polar bear attacks: European expansion into the Arctic led to increased conflict with, and exploitation of, polar bears. For example, a commercial expedition to Svalbard in 1610 reported killing 27 polar bears and catching 5 cubs. Commercial polar bear hunting continued through the centuries. In the early decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of bears were harvested on Svalbard annually. In 1924 alone, at least 901 polar bears were harvested on Svalbard . The widespread use of fossil fuels further accelerated human access to remote areas of the Arctic, resulting in significant hunting pressure on polar bears throughout their range after World War II. As a result, by the 1960s, the most significant threat facing polar bears was over-hunting, and populations in some areas were considered to be substantially reduced. [Source: “Polar bear attacks on humans: Implications of a changing climate” by James Wilder, U.S. Forest Service; Dag Vongraven, Norwegian Polar Institute; Todd C. Atwood, United States Geological Survey, Wildlife Society, July 2, 2017]

Through the 1970s more polar bears were killed in Western countries than in Russia, where polar bears have been protected since 1956. In an attempt to keep trophy hunters from shooting studied bears in the 1970s, scientists spray painted huge numbers on the side of the animals. In spite of this, of 103 animals tagged over a third were killed by hunters within a couple of years.

In the 1990s, the Canadian government allowed 500 of country's polar bears to be hunted every year. Alaska allowed 100 a year. Hunts are also regulated in Norway, Greenland and Russia. After the break up of the Soviet Union, there was reported to be a surge in poaching of polar bears in the Chukchi sea region between Alaska and Siberia.

Polar Bear Research

Hunter with a polar bear in Alaska in 1924

Neil Ever Osborne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: The air is harsh, dry, frigid. We huddle on the deck of Tundra Buggy One, a big-wheeled custom built all terrain vehicle retrofitted for traveling over frozen ground and viewing polar bears.Geoff York, senior director of conservation for Polar Bears International (PBI), uses Buggy One as a roving research station. It’s equipped with GPS, Wi-Fi and polar bear cams that beam live footage to classrooms around the world. [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

PBI monitors polar bears across the Arctic partly to determine the impacts of climate change on the behavior and physical condition of the animals as well as population trends. One program has tracked polar bears outfitted with GPS ear tags or collars that transmit locations to researchers to gain insight into the animals’ movements. York says, “Our understanding of polar bear biology, ecology and behavior is critical for long-term conservation and can inform on-the-ground efforts like human-bear conflict management.”

When polar bears were studied in the 1970s some some were caught as they approached the research ship out of curiosity. Others were lured with the scent of burning seal blubber. Others still were tracked down with dogs. The most successful method of catching them was using a box-like device in which a bear was shot with a tranquilizing dart from a firing weapon, triggered when the bear took a piece of bait. A lethal version of this contraption took two thirds of the bears killed in the Norwegian Arctic until they were outlawed in 1970.

Polar bears are tranquilized with seven cubic centimeter of Telazol. When polar bears were first studied in the wild sometimes the animals were shot with tranquilizing darts which was fine unless they jumped in the water. If this happened a noose was wrapped around the bear and its head was held above water so it wouldn't drown. In one Norwegian study, of 103 bear captured this way only one was lost to sea. While a polar bear is tranquilized, scientists collect blood and fat samples, extract a vestigial tooth to determine age, attach ear tags and measure the bears's temperature, length, girth and weight with an large aluminum tripod. On a rare occasion the bears wake up unexpectedly.

Tracking a bear coast about $2,000 per animal in the 1990s. Scientist at that time were still not sure where males went in the winter because radio collars didn’t stay on their necks and the batteries in ear transmitters wore out after a month. At that time there were plans to mount small video cameras on bear collars that transmitted images via radio signals.

Polar Bear Tourism in Churchill, Manitoba

Neil Ever Osborne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: About 10,000 people arrive in Churchill every fall to see polar bears. Visitors gather at the Tundra Buggy Lodge, a research and tourism outpost on the Hudson Bay coast. It’s also home to PBI’s newest technology, the SpotterRF — a compact surveillance device designed to contend with threats like drone attacks. Here, it’s used to spot polar bears. [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

In the most basic sense, the SpotterRF is a motion detector — much like those used to turn porch lights on. As bears move on the tundra, they trigger the sensors. Their locations pulsate on a digital map, which can be analyzed by York and other scientists. The software performs well at night and in snowstorms, and may one day serve as an early warning system for Churchill.

To keep us safe, Buggy One has backed into a fenced platform at the Tundra Buggy Lodge, like a spaceship docking into port. Inside the Lodge, the SpotterRF radar beeps to signal the approach of a trio of bears. One of them, precocious and curious, toddles near enough that we could poke a finger through the bars and touch its nose. York has told us about “bear jail,” an enclosure that captures bears in town so they can be relocated. But here, he says with an approving smile, “we’re the ones in the cage.”

The next afternoon, back out on the tundra, we watch skinny bears pace the shore. Some hunker down in kelp beds, chewing on the seaweed. A big male stomps the snow with both front paws. Another lies encircled in a snowdrift. When the tide comes in, sunlight escapes the patchy bank of clouds and brightens the mosaic of ice floes on the bay. From the willows, a mother approaches with a cub, their pace slowing as they take in two large bears skulking where the ice meets the water. The mother looks past them, and from the deck of the vehicle we follow her gaze, out to the bay’s churn. York hopes the ice will be solid soon. “If they go too early, and the ice breaks up, they’d have a long swim back to shore.”

Polar Bears and Pollution

Polar bears are surprisingly being threatened by pollution even though there are virtually no pollution sources in their ranges. Scientists have found chemicals like DDT, PCBs and organochlorines in bear fat and urine that originated in Asia, Europe and North America and were passed on the bears through the food chain, increasing a billionfold in concentrations as they went up.

According to the Washington Post: Polar bears are threatened by polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and other toxic pollution — primarily from eating seals and other animals affected by these carcinogens — that has been linked to brain damage, even causing some bears’ baculums, or penis bones, to break off. [Source: Adam Popescu, Washington Post, May 23, 2016]

High concentrations of DDT have been found in polar bears even though the chemical is only used in a handful of places to fight malatia. Deformed male polar cubs born with female genitalia and partial penises found in Svakbard are believed to be victims of toxins, perhaps DDT or PCBs. Scientists base this theory on the fact the condition has been found among several cubs in Svalbard, which is relatively close to Europe, but is rare among cubs in remote regions of the Arctic.

Scientists have also found small amounts of BDEs—flame retardants found in televisions, computers and toys—in bears. The amounts are minute and don’t pose a health problem to the bears. What is alarming is that they are there at all. The nearest sources of these chemicals is more than 1,100 kilometers away. It is worrisome that they some how made their way to the Arctic.

Polar Bears and Climate Change

Polar bears are suffering as a result of climate change, which has caused the premature melting of ice platforms in some places used by bears to hunt seals, their primary source of food. According to Associated Press: Polar bears rely on Arctic sea ice — frozen ocean water — that shrinks in the summer with warmer temperatures and forms again in the long winter. They use it to hunt, perching near holes in the thick ice to spot seals, their favorite food, coming up for air. But as the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world because of climate change, sea ice is cracking earlier in the year and taking longer to freeze in the fall. That has left many polar bears that live across the Arctic with less ice on which to live, hunt and reproduce. [Source: Associated Press, December 23, 2022]

Models in a 2013 study published in the journal suggest that Arctic sea ice is declining at a rate of 13 percent per decade. When sea ice melts, bears go ashore and fast. Studies have shown that in some places the ice is melting weeks earlier than it did years before. The thickness of Arctic ice has decreased from 10.2 feet in 1976 to 4.4 feet in 2000. The area covered by sea ice declined about 6 percent from 1978 to 1995. As a result of melting Arctic ice polar bears are coming ashore earlier, losing weight and having fewer cubs. By the end of the 21st century the ice platforms that polar use are expected to literally melt away. If this does indeed happen, bears will be faced with the choice of staying on land, where they risk starvation, or swimming out in the sea to find ice to hunt off food, in the process using up a lot of energy, and losing weight, which would affect their reproductive capability. To do this mothers would have to leave their cubs behind and they would almost certainly die.

According to a report on polar bear attacks: Arctic sea ice extent and thickness have declined over the last four decades, leading some to conclude that the Arctic Ocean in summer may be largely ice free soon In some parts of the polar bear range, diminishing summer sea ice has resulted in the increased use of terrestrial habitat by polar bears. Longer ice-free periods shorten polar bear hunting opportunities during the critical hyperphagic period of late spring and early summer, when hunting conditions are most favorable, and extend the duration of the on-land period through which polar bears must survive on finite stores of body fat. The resultant increased fasting has significant negative effects on polar bear body condition and the increasing ice-free period has been linked to declines in survival. Longer periods of fasting and increased nutritional stress have also been attributed to incidents of infanticide, cannibalism, and starvation in some polar bear subpopulations suggested that cannibalism is not an uncommon phenomenon in polar bear biology. [Source: “Polar bear attacks on humans: Implications of a changing climate” by James Wilder, U.S. Forest Service; Dag Vongraven, Norwegian Polar Institute; Todd C. Atwood, United States Geological Survey, Wildlife Society, July 2, 2017]

Some Scientists estimate the number of polar bears will decline by 30 percent in the next 35 to 50 years. Some say this an exaggeration. While the bears have declined in some places. There number shave increased in others. In Canada, home to most of the world’s polar bears, the numbers increased by 20 percent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The numbers increased because of more restrictions on hunting. Some think that climate change may have played a role in the increase. There was a period 120,000 years ago when the Earth was significantly warmer than it is now and polar bears managed to survive that. In May 2004, polar bears were stranded on remote “Bear Island,” which is part of Norway, by rapidly melting ice. There was nothing really on the island for the bears to eat and calls were made tor rescue them.

Polar Bears of Hudson Bay

Neil Ever Osborne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Bears in the Western Hudson are especially vulnerable, because they must go without food for months after the spring melt. During our visit in early November, the bay’s newly formed ice, having warmed, began to shatter like a teacup. Days later, a south wind pushed it all ashore. “We need north winds bringing cool air and a few days at minus 20 Celsius,” Geoff York, senior director of conservation for Polar Bears International (PBI), said, a note of concern in his voice.[Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

On the bay this fall morning, there’s a wind-carved rim of ice and a gathering of floes. One male polar bear, bony after a season without seal blubber, struggles along the slushy edge, haunches soaked, nearly slipping into the sea. We are on Gordon Point, in northern Manitoba, where Hudson Bay widens into its northwest crescent. Polar winds make it colder than at comparable latitudes, and the shallow waters of the bay freeze early. Having passed the summer months in the subArctic wild of Wapusk National Park to the south, polar bears now congregate here, waiting for the ice to come in.

From the deck of Buggy One, there are several bears in sight, mostly large males. Invisible in an Arctic blizzard, their double-layer coats, not stark white but golden like sheep’s wool, stand out faintly in the distance on a clear day such as this. They tussle playfully or sleep among the twiggy willow stands on shore. One immense bear sits humanlike on its haunches, blades of grass in its teeth. Others wander the ice rim with a lazy gait that belies their lethal quickness.

“The big bears have likely scared off the family groups,” York says, explaining that at this desperate time of year, when adults are near-starving before the sealing season, males are more likely to cannibalize cubs and attack humans. From November, when the ice fastens to shore, to May, when it breaks up, the ice is polar bear territory across the Arctic. The bears sleep on the ice at night, and pregnant females can even hibernate there during the winter. Males and non-pregnant females stay active through the winter days, and the ice is their hunting ground. Laying ambush behind a pressure ridge of ice fragments, the bears stalk seals. “On the ice, they’re slow,” York says of the seals. “The bears are explosive as they run them down.”

Polar Bears at Hudson Bay Dying at Alarming Rate

Polar bears in Canada's Hudson Bay — on the southern edge of the Arctic — have been dying in high numbers in recent years, with females and bear cubs having an especially hard time. The population in the Western Hudson has fallen from 1,200 polar bears in the 1990s to about 800 in the early 2020s. Climate change has shrunk the expanse of sea ice that once spread from the North Pole to southern Hudson Bay. In 2020, the ice area was the second smallest since measuring began in the 1970s, and it is thinner than ever. [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

Associated Press reported: Researchers surveyed Western Hudson Bay — home to Churchill, the town called ‘the Polar Bear Capital of the World,' — by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, compared to the 842 in 2016, when they were last surveyed.“The actual decline is a lot larger than I would have expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for nearly four decades. Derocher was not involved in the study. [Source: Associated Press, December 23, 2022]

U.S. Geological Survey map shows projected changes in polar bear habitat from 2001 to 2010 and 2041 to 2050

Ice is melting in the western Hudson Bay weeks earlier than it did in the past and those weeks that have been knocked off have traditionally been a time when the bears gorged on seal pups. Polar bears in the Hudson Bay are having fewer cubs. Climate change and the earlier spring ice break up are believed to be involved. Since the ice has started melting earlier around the Hudson bay, scientist say that newborn cubs have a lower body weight and are in poorer health than cubs born when there was more ice and that older cubs stay with their mothers longer. One study linked shrinking polar bear penises with climate change.

Since the 1980s, the number of bears in the region has fallen by nearly 50 percent, the authors found. The number of polar bears in the western Hudson has fell 17 percent from 1,200 to less than 1,000 between the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s. Researchers said the concentration of deaths in young bears and females in Western Hudson Bay is alarming. “Those are the types of bears we’ve always predicted would be affected by changes in the environment,” said Stephen Atkinson, the lead author who has studied polar bears for more than 30 years.

Young bears need energy to grow and cannot survive long periods without enough food and female bears struggle because they expend so much energy nursing and rearing offspring. “It certainly raises issues about the ongoing viability,” Derocher said. “That is the reproductive engine of the population.”The capacity for polar bears in the Western Hudson Bay to reproduce will diminish, Atkinson said, “because you simply have fewer young bears that survive and become adults.”

Neil Ever Osborne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Polar bears are hardy creatures — they can fast for upward of 180 days and swim hundreds of miles without a break — but consensus among scientists is the animals won’t be able to find new food sources once they can no longer hunt seals. If a warming climate shrinks sea ice at projected rates, most polar bear populations will be too nutrient-starved to reproduce by the end of the 21st century. [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

Climate Change Increased Dangerous Polar Bear and Human Encounters

According to a report on polar bear attacks: When on shore, some nutritionally stressed bears are highly motivated to obtain food however they can, and appear more willing to risk interacting with humans as a result. Increased frequency of hungry bears on land due to retreating sea ice, coupled with expanding human activity in the polar bear range, is expected to result in a greater risk of human-polar bear interaction and conflict. [Source: “Polar bear attacks on humans: Implications of a changing climate” by James Wilder, U.S. Forest Service; Dag Vongraven, Norwegian Polar Institute; Todd C. Atwood, United States Geological Survey, Wildlife Society, July 2, 2017]

Neil Ever Osborne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Shrinking sea ice seems to be leading bears to wander into human settlements from Russia to Norway, Greenland to Alaska. Problems ensue. In Alaska, an offshoot of a Russian polar bear patrol program trains communities to use tools like bear spray, flashlights, air horns and rubber bullets to deter bears and protect themselves, while Canada’s Nunavut Territory administers similar efforts through a polar bear conflict manager based in Igloolik. Here in northern Manitoba, a comparable program operates in Churchill, “The Polar Bear Capital of the World.” [Source: Neil Ever Osborne, Smithsonian magazine, March 2021]

Churchill is a town utterly of the north. Its gridded blocks of aluminum-sided houses sit between miles of cratered tundra and the icy mouth of the Churchill River. This cold flank of Hudson Bay was once a meeting place for Inuit hunters and the Cree and Dene First Nations. Today, about three-quarters of Churchill’s almost 900 residents identify as indigenous. The town boasts one of the only movie theaters within a thousand miles, as well as access to Canada’s only deep-water port in the Arctic.

As the climate warms, more bears wander into Churchill to scavenge — or moon around in backyards, or chew the seat off a snowmobile. Mayor Michael Spence, a member of the Cree First Nation, says bear sightings were a novelty when he was a boy in the early 1960s — he remembers playing in a game of road hockey that was interrupted by a mother and two cubs — but today they are more common.

On Halloween 2013, a 30-year-old woman named Erin Greene, who had moved to Churchill from Montreal the previous year, was leaving a party with friends when she looked over her shoulder. “There’s this bear that’s already full-speed running at us,” Greene says. While her friends ran for help, the bear began carrying her off. “I realized that this was a fight I couldn’t win on my own and just accepted that this is the way I was going to die,” she says.

Just in time, a neighbor appeared, striking the bear’s head with a shovel. The bear dropped her and she was airlifted to the hospital to treat her life-threatening injuries. Despite the terrifying ordeal Greene suffered, and the scars and occasional pains she still bears, she returned to Churchill. The reason, she says, is a quality particular to the north. “The cold burns your face, the sky is beautiful, the animals could be around every corner. It’s so real, it’s so raw,” she says. She feels a different connection to polar bears now — “a different understanding.” Her medical bills added up to thousands of dollars, but the local community paid them all.

More than 50 Polar Bears Invade Russian Settlements

In February 2019, at least 52 bears entered the area near Belushya Guba, the main settlement on an the island in the Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. Dozens of polar bears were seen trying to enter homes, civic buildings, and inhabited areas. Footage shows the polar bears looking for food in the rubbish at a local dump. Polar bears cannot subsist on a garbage-based diet because of a lack of enough protein and fat. The Arkhangelsk Oblast authorities declared a state of emergency.[Source: Wikipedia]

Local administrator Alexander Minayev said several bears came into the settlement's territory. People were frightened and did not want to leave their homes, so their planned daily routines were stopped. "Parents are afraid to let the children go to school or kindergarten," Minayev said. He also said that the bears "literally chased people in the region". Zhigansha Musin, the head of the local administration, said, "There have never been so many polar bears in this area since 1983".Hunting polar bears and shooting them has been prohibited by law in Russia, and vehicle patrols and dogs were not successful in deterring them. A team of experts was dispatched to the Arctic region to remove polar bears coming into the inhabited area and its vicinity.

In December 209, The Huffington Post reported: A local “bear patrol” reported 56 polar bears gathered near the far northeast Russian village of Ryrkaypiy on the Chukchi Sea, according to a statement from World Wildlife Fund Russia. “Almost all the bears are thin,” Tatyana Minenko, head of the village’s bear patrol, said in the WWF Russia release. “There are both adult and young animals, including cubs of different ages with their moms.” The bears appear to be feeding on walrus carcasses. “Around five years ago, it would be rare to see more than three to five bears in a group near the village, biologist Anatoly Kochnev told Russian news agency TASS. [Source: Hilary Hanson, Huffington Post, December 8, 2019]

Scientists believed this climate change is the main reason for the aggressive behavior of the polar bears. Russia's World Wildlife Fund said "Today, polar bears are entering human areas more frequently than in the past and climate change is the reason. Global warming is reducing sea-ice and this phenomenon forces polar bears to come to land in order to find new sources of food". Liz Greengrass, a director at the UK animal conservation charity Born Free Foundation told CNN that seals are the most popular food for polar bears, but global warming is shrinking their environment, so polar bears must change their food regime.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2025