Zoos Want to Import Polar Bears to Save the Species

Photos by Jeffrey F. Bill/THE MARYLAND ZOO IN BALTIMORE - Magnet and Anoki are polar bears at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. Magnet is on all fours on the left and Anoki is on the right.

 Polar bears are perfectly suited to life in the Arctic: Their hair blends in with the snow; their heavy, strongly curved claws allow them to climb over blocks of ice and snow and grip their prey securely; and the rough pads on their feet keep them from slipping.

The one thing they cannot survive is the loss of the ice, and the changes in worldwide climate threaten to melt the summer sea ice on which they hunt. Scientists say two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear by about 2050. 

So a group of American zoo and aquarium officials are asking the federal government to let them import orphaned bear cubs from Canada, so that some can be bred in captivity. Zoos have helped save endangered species before, such as the California condor and the Mexican wolf, which were bred in zoos and then set free into the wild.

“If you don’t build these insurance populations when you have the animals, then it’s too late,” said the Toledo (Ohio) Zoo’s mammals curator Randi Meyerson, chairman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ polar bear species survival program. “We’re planning for something we hope we don’t need.”

Today 64 captive polar bears live in accredited institutions such as the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, which has three. The National Zoo had 13 polar bears between 1959 and 1980, but it no longer has any and has no plans to try to get one because the bears are so expensive to care for.

Right now, polar bears cannot be imported into the United States for public display under federal law. Robert Gabel, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s international affairs program, said that in order to bring bears into U.S. zoos, “we’d have to show that an import would either stabilize or increase the wild population of polar bears. It’s difficult to show how an import would accomplish that.”

Lily Peacock, a research biologist in the U.S. Geological Survey’s polar bear program, said the best way to help this threatened species is by cutting the heat-trapping gases that come from cars and trucks and burning coal to generate electricity.

“If the world cares about polar bears, reducing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere is the only way to preserve polar bears’ habitat,” she said.

Even backers of the zoo plan say that reducing carbon emissions is the top priority for saving polar bears.

Robert Buchanan, president of Polar Bears International, a group that works to help the animals, said displaying them in zoos could represent the best way to persuade the public to make such cuts.

“The only way at this time to save bears is to have people change their habits, and the way to do that is through zoos and aquariums,” he said. “Polar bears are just ambassadors for their friends in the Arctic.”

By Juliet Eilperi@The Washington Post: Kidspost

The Wanderer: The Arctic Fox by Garry Hamilton

 

New studies suggest that the secret to winter survival for some Arctic foxes is their incredible ability to keep on the go for months on end. 

IN SPRING 2008, Canadian biologists began monitoring a female Arctic fox living on Bylot Island, a landmass of mostly mountains and glaciers that rises from the Arctic Ocean just north of Baffin Island, some 250 miles west of Greenland. At first, there was nothing unusual about the animal’s behavior. She found a den and a mate, and together the pair carried out the exhausting task of rearing 11 hungry pups. But as fall set in, a switch seemed to flip inside her brain—a switch that caused her to do something that for most other animals her size would be a death sentence: She began to wander.

Initially, the fox moved northward off the island and onto the permanent Arctic ice cap. She remained there for nearly four months, zigzagging hundreds of miles over crumbled ice under conditions that included minus 40-degree F temperatures and close to 90 days without direct sunlight. Come April, she headed southwest, eventually reaching Baffin Island, where she spent three weeks tracing a 620-mile loop before returning for yet more time on the sea ice. She wasn’t finished. In mid-May, she turned west and trekked another 750 miles before eventually spending the summer of 2009 on Somerset Island, a low-lying mass of mostly barren rock the size of Vermont. By the time a year had passed, the intrepid canine had logged more than 3,100 miles.

Unlike many denizens of the Far North, Arctic foxes don’t hibernate, hunker down in a den beneath the snow or migrate south during the cold months. Instead, they remain active, taking the full cruelty of the Arctic winter head on. How they pull off such a feat has long been a mystery, but recent advances in satellite-tracking technology have finally enabled scientists to monitor the animals’ movements during the nine months of the year when the little predators are otherwise inaccessible.

The first completed studies suggest that, at least for some of the creatures, one secret to survival is their incredible ability to wander. Arctic foxes that decide not to stay in one area during the long winter appear to be true nomads, roaming distances that are continental in scale. “What we’re finding is that for most of the year, the foxes that leave don’t seem to have a home range,” says Dominique Berteaux, a biologist at the University of Quebec at Rimouski who heads the ongoing research on Bylot Island. “There’s no home. It’s all range.”

Records of the species’ unusual behavior date back more than a century. During his failed attempt to reach the North Pole on foot in the spring of 1895, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen encountered several sets of fox footprints as he crossed the ice cap above the 85th parallel. “What in the world was that fox doing up here?” he wrote in his journal. Nansen, who was heading home at that point, took this sign of life to mean land was near. In fact, he had another three weeks of solid slogging before he reached the remote islands now known as Franz Josef Land.

Read more: 

Polar Bears Turn Cannibalistic as Climate Change Depletes Arctic Food Supply by Rheana Murray

 

An adult male polar bear with the carcass of a cub, in the Arctic Ocean, near the Svalbard Archipelago. 

Dwindling Arctic Sea ice is cutting off polar bears’ food supply, forcing the starving animals to devour their own kind.

While cannibalism among polar bears isn’t unheard of, experts say the behavior is becoming increasingly common.

“There are increasing numbers of observations of it occurring,” photojournalist Jenny Ross told BBC News. “Particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change.”

 

Ross explained how the higher temperatures melt ice more quickly, leaving the bears less time to fuel up on ice-dependent seals, the animals’ main source of food.

"Weights of adults are decreasing, litters are smaller, fewer young bears are surviving, and the overall population size is shrinking,” she said.

Ross, whose research was published in the January 2012 edition of Ocean Geographic Magazine, described watching a bear guard its kill, a cub.

“As soon as the adult male became aware that a boat was approaching him, he basically stood to my attention — he straddled the young bear’s body, asserting control over it and conveying ‘this is my food,’” she recalled to BBC News.

“He then picked up the bear in his jaws and, just using the power of his jaws and his neck, transported it from one floe to another.

“And eventually, when he was a considerable distance away, he stopped and fed on the carcass.”

Read more @ NYDailyNews.com 

Thin Ice Jeopardizes Polar Bears in Manitoba: CBC News

Hundreds of polar bears in northeastern Manitoba may face an increased risk of starvation due to delayed ice formation along the western coast of Hudson Bay, conservationists say.

Higher-than-normal temperatures have prevented ice from forming in the region, putting it three to four weeks behind schedule, according to the Canadian Ice Service, a division of Environment Canada. As a result, minimum ice cover there is the lowest since 1971, Canadian Ice Service forecaster Luc Desjardins said.

Formation of sea ice is critical for polar bears, which use it as a platform for catching seals and other marine mammals.

While a recent aerial survey of 333 polar bears along the bay's western coast showed the bears to be in good condition, conservationists worry the animals' health will deteriorate quickly if ice does not form in the next few weeks.

"The conditions that are occurring are indicative of the ice coverage that we would see probably in the mid-October time frame, rather than the mid-November," Desjardins told CBC News last month.

Normally by late November, a thin layer of ice up to 15 miles long would have formed, stretching seaward from the bay's western and southern coastlines, he said.

"The ice is almost non-existent this year, compared to our long-term normal," Desjardins said.

Where there is ice, "it's very patchy in terms of formation and it's not a distinct pattern that affects the entire length of the coast of Hudson Bay."

Desjardins stressed that the amount of ice has fluctuated in recent years and 2010 levels are not "significantly different" from those of the last five or six years.

What is different, however, is temperature: the region's air temperature is “consistently warmer" than in recent years, he said.

In Nunavut's Foxe Basin, the temperature is 14 degrees above normal.

Winter is the polar bear's feasting season. From November until early summer, they fatten themselves on ringed seals, bearded seals and other mammals. In the summer, during what's called a "walking hibernation," the average polar bear loses 1.6 kilograms of weight per day.

Ideally, the slow, heavy predators have enough weight by the end of the summer to make it back onto the ice platforms and hunt anew for fatty mammals.

"The longer that ice is in forming, the longer the polar bears have to survive on the fat reserves they put down in the spring and conserved right through the summer," said Peter Ewin, an Arctic specialist for the World Wildlife Fund.

Read more: