Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)

Assembled from 34 blocks · 1 evidence · 36 related

1. Story
2. A bear that is legally and ecologically a marine mammal: it hunts seals from the surface of the sea ice, and where the ice goes it goes. It is the clearest single expression of the Arctic's structure, because it could only exist where a land carnivore lineage had physical access to a frozen ocean - it diverged from brown bears comparatively recently and walked out onto the sea from a continent. The IUCN assessment published in 2015 gave a global figure in the region of twenty-six thousand animals across nineteen recognised subpopulations, with wide uncertainty and several subpopulations for which no reliable estimate exists at all, and listed the species as Vulnerable with sea-ice loss as the principal threat. Nothing in Antarctica occupies this niche, and nothing can: there is no land route to the southern ice.
3. Knowledge
4. Arctic Ocean
5. Sea Ice
6. Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
7. Connections
8. Sea Ice
9. Arctic Ocean
10. Polynya
11. Arctic Amplification
12. Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba)
13. Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
14. Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
15. Halley Bay Emperor Penguin Colony
16. The continuous satellite sea-ice record begins
17. A long-term decline in krill density is linked to winter sea ice
18. The Arctic summer minimum drops far below anything previously observed
19. The lowest Arctic sea-ice extent in the satellite record
20. The Halley Bay emperor colony fails and does not recover
21. The emperor penguin is listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act
22. Antarctic sea ice reaches a record low, a year after the previous one
23. Antarctica
24. Arctic Amplification
25. Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
26. Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea)
27. Arctic Council
28. Inuit
29. The continuous satellite sea-ice record begins
30. The Arctic summer minimum drops far below anything previously observed
31. The lowest Arctic sea-ice extent in the satellite record
32. Seven Arctic states pause participation in the Arctic Council
33. Evidence
34. The 2015 global assessment lists the polar bear as Vulnerable, gives a global figure in the region of 26,000 animals with wide uncertainty across nineteen recognised subpopulations, several of which have no reliable estimate, and identifies loss of sea-ice habitat as the principal threat. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: iucnredlist.org was not reachable during production and no search was possible. The assessment may have been superseded since 2015; the figures here must be checked against the current Red List entry.