Polar Bears’ Hunting Season is Getting Shorter

Polar bear mother with yearling cubs. Photo credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Last year, after ice hit a record low, the fall freeze up was delayed. The lack of near-shore ice over the shallow waters where most seals live left the polar bears with a much foreshortened period to hunt for seals in areas where the seals are abundant.

Right now in the dead of winter, the polar bears are struggling to make up for the calories they were unable to gain in the fall.

Struggle Increasing to Feed Cubs

Finding food to eat is not just about meeting adult polar bears’ hunger—it’s also about making sure that the cubs at their side will survive. Adult female polar bears must find enough food to build up the reserves they need to become pregnant and successfully give birth and nurse tiny cubs in their secure winter den.

Pregnant polar bears are the only ones who enter dens in the fall; other polar bears, including females that have cubs, will hunt all winter.  Pregnant females will give birth to a litter of usually two tiny cubs in their highly insulated den. After 5-6 months in their den, the family will emerge from their dens and begin their hunt for the food they need to assure her cubs will survive.

After they leave their dens, the polar bear moms must find enough seals to replenish her depleted reserves and give her cubs a shot at surviving for the next 2 years, until the cubs are able to fend for themselves.

Climate Change Harming Cubs’ Survival

Climate change is dramatically reducing the amount of time available for mother polar bears to hunt enough seals to give her cubs a chance of surviving.

The ice is increasingly far off shore and over deeper waters which are less productive for their prey of seals.  And climate change is causing arctic ice over the shallow near-shore waters where seals are most abundant to both break up earlier in the spring and to form up later in the fall.

This leaves all polar bears less and less time to find food, but the squeeze is particularly hard on recent mothers because of the high energy demands associated with giving birth to and raising their cubs. Polar bear moms nurse their cubs for over two years until the cubs are big enough to survive on their own.

When polar bears can’t find as much food in the spring and fall as they need, cubs just aren’t born or do not survive.

Fight for the Next Generation of Polar Bears

For polar bear moms to win their struggle against hunger, they need us to curb the unprecedented warming in the Arctic. Alaska has warmed twice as much as the contiguous United States, and warming is severely altering the Arctic landscape, including melting permafrost.

In 2012, over 3 million people like you spoke up in support of limits to carbon pollution from new coal-fired power plants.  Across the U.S., three times as many voters say the government is doing too little to protect America’s air, water, wildlife and other natural resources (44 percent) as say it’s doing too much (14 percent), according to a post-election Zogby poll.  And two-thirds of voters (65 percent) say elected officials should take steps now to reduce the impact of climate change on future generations, while just 27 percent say we should wait for more evidence.

The President is listening, but time is short. We need to remind President Obama that his legacy depends on taking action on climate change by taking immediate steps to halt the expansion of dirty energy, like tar sands, and set limits on carbon pollution from coal-burning power plants—the largest source of carbon pollution in the nation.

Let’s take advantage of this opportunity.

Speak up for the polar bears cubs—urge the President to move forward on addressing climate change now.

Shell’s Kulluk Oil Rig, credit Tom Doyle/Flickr

Shell’s rig is not simply another rig.  It is the pioneer, intended to open a new frontier and convert an unspoiled aquatic wilderness into the next big oil rush. These waters are vital habitat for an abundance of wildlife such as ringed seals, as well as whales that travel the world’s oceans and birds that migrate across North America every year.

Shell Oil:  A Large Spill is Not “Reasonably Foreseeable.”

As a team of oil spill experts warned in a thorough report of Arctic ocean drilling the risks are being minimized and ignored now just as they have been ignored before, as we witnessed so tragically with BP’s ultra deepwater operations. In the Gulf, we had the largest spill response infrastructure in the country to support a dense concentration of long term operations.  In the remote Arctic waters, there is nothing except rough seas and sea ice that can close waters to recovery operations for long periods of time.  Shell is bringing up a single spill response barge.  It’s hard enough to cast a crab pot in these waters, let alone contain millions of barrels of spilled oil.  NWF’s Peter Lafontaine noted last summer this statement by US Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp:

“If the company fails, if the response plan fails, the federal government must in some way be able to back it up with some resources. We had plenty of resources, from bases to communication systems to helicopters, in the Gulf of Mexico. And if this were to happen off the North Slope of Alaska, we’d have nothing.”

So we are crossing our fingers and trusting that Shell can mobilize the resources to handle a spill.  At least they are taking the risk seriously, right?  Well, no:

“A large oil spill, such as a crude release from a blowout, is extremely rare and not
considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.” — Shell Alaska Chukchi Sea Exploration Plan

Sound familiar?  Here’s what BP said in their Gulf drilling plans prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout:

“In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to
have an impact based on the industry-wide standards for using proven equipment
and technology for such responses.” –Oil Spill Response Plan for BP Deepwater Horizon Drilling

Should we trust an oil company to begin drilling in these unspoiled waters when their plans are based on the premise that a large oil spill isn’t “reasonably forseeable?” No, we know better.  But they received a green light, anyway.

Does Wildlife Matter to Government Drilling Regulators?

Bearded Seal, via Kerry Ritz/Flickr

No evidence?!  Here are some of BOEMRE’s conclusions from their own environmental assessment of what could happen in a major spill (one that significantly underestimates the potential for a long-running blow-out like we saw in the Gulf):

Assuming that all young ringed and bearded seals exposed to the oil died because of absorption (through the skin), inhalation, and/or ingestion of toxic hydrocarbons in the oil, this loss could take these marine mammal populations more than one to two generations to recover Shell (p. 131-2).

Polar bears exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons through direct contact or by ingesting oiled prey would probably not survive (p. 132)

In lagoon habitats, long-tailed duck densities suggest that when large concentrations of molting individuals are present, tens of thousands could be contacted by spilled oil. This would constitute a substantial loss to the regional population. Notable losses would also be experienced by post-breeding common eiders concentrated near barrier islands and in lagoons. A spill …would be expected to contact several other species present in substantial numbers, including the king eider, scoters, northern pintail, Pacific loon, and glaucous gull. (p. 130-1)

Oil Disasters: An Acceptable Cost of Doing Business?

Everyone knows where this story ends up…it really comes down to how often and how big the spills will be off Alaska’s northern shores, and how badly wildlife is impacted.  But the risks of a wildlife disaster are all an acceptable cost of doing business for oil companies.  After all, BP pocketed $24 billion in profits in 2011.  Deepwater Horizon was a financial blip for them, but the damages to marine life will be long-lasting.

Birds dropped out of the sky, dead fish covered miles of the surface of rivers and bays, the media started digging up any reference to mass animal deaths they could find, and the public voiced a growing concern about what it all meant.

These kinds of die-offs are unusual but not unheard of in the nature, and so the good news is that while alarming, they don’t mean the world is ending and probably won’t have too much impact on the overall survival of the species that have experienced them.

While most wildlife experts see little cause for significant concern with these events, there are some mass wildlife deaths that we really should be worrying about.

5. Colony Collapse Disorder

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) causes honey bees to mysteriously abandon their hives and die. First reported in the United States in 2006, scientists are still trying to figure out the exact causes. While not native to North America, honey bees are critically important for the pollination of over 100 crops that both people and our livestock rely on for food. Eighty percent of all crop pollination service in the U.S. is provided by honey bees, which means that one-third of all the food we eat is directly the result of these insects. Honey bees also play an important role pollinating wild plants that wildlife depend on for survival. This mass die-off of honey bees could have significant economic and ecological repercussions.

Theories for the cause of CCD include infestation by exotic mites, viruses, a fungus, pesticides or other chemical pollutants, global warming, stress on hives from industrial beekeeping practices, or a combination of these factors that is suddenly pushing millions of honey bee hives over their tipping point and ultimately to death. While native pollinators can help fill in the gap caused by honey bee CCD, unexplained mass die-offs in several native bumble bee species are now also being reported.

4. White-Nosed Syndrome

North American bats are dropping like flies as a result of this mysterious ailment, which is characterized by the growth of a white fungus on the face of bats that hibernate in colonies in caves during the winter. The bats repeatedly wake up from their hibernation and fly about despite the cold temperatures and lack of insect food. In doing so, the bats burn off critical calories and ultimately die. Some bat hibernation caves have experienced mortality rates as high as 99 percent and since 2006 millions of bats have succumbed.

Scientists don’t know if the fungus is the cause of the odd behavior and killing bats directly, or if it is simply a secondary symptom of some other problem. One thing is certain, White-Nosed Syndrome has spread rapidly across the country, adding additional threat to endangered species such as the Indiana bat and drastically reducing once-common species like the little brown bat. Scientists are still searching for a clue as to the cause of these devastating mass bat deaths.

3. Global Amphibian Decline

Amphibians are often considered to be ecological “canaries in the coal mine” because their sensitive skin allows for the exchange of gas and liquids, making them particularly vulnerable to pollution and other disturbances to their habitat. As a result, amphibians are often the first group of animals to die out in disturbed or polluted environments. Dying out is exactly what amphibians are doing all around the world, and scientists don’t know why.

As with Colony Collapse Disorder, any number of causes could be at work either by themselves or in concert, including air and water pollution, global warming, habitat destruction, invasive species and most notably the type of chytrid fungus known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or “Bd” for short. This fungus was discovered in 1999 and has been rapidly spreading and killing mass numbers of amphibians on several continents, including both North and South America, Europe and Australia. As with White-Nose Syndrome in bats, it’s not known whether this chytrid fungus is a new, random pathogen or if it has always been present and is only now spreading because of other, as-yet-unknown reasons. The statistics are frightening: thirty percent of amphibian species on the planet are listed as either threatened or endangered and another six percent are listed as near threatened. Scientists don’t know the status of another twenty-five percent.

2. Gulf Oil Disaster

The official wildlife body count of the Gulf Oil Disaster is 5,686 dead birds, 546 dead sea turtles, and 96 dead dolphins and whales. And that’s just the animals that rescue workers were able to recover in the vast area of the Gulf of Mexico affected by the millions of gallons of oil that gushed into the Gulf’s waters and coastal wetlands when BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. It’s doubtless that the wildlife death toll is more likely in the millions when you factor in open ocean species such as sperm whales or whale sharks that sink when dead or that might not immediately die but eventually succumb to slow poisoning as they eat contaminated food, as well as the fish and marine invertebrates that have also died but for which no one has a count. Even worse, judging from previous oil disasters such as the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, we can expect wildlife will continue to die for months, years or even decades as a result of this disaster.

1. Global Warming

The scale of the impact that global warming is predicted to have on wildlife across the planet can’t be understated.

We are already experiencing the rapid melting of glaciers, more severe storms, an increase in droughts, wildfires and flooding events, the spread of invasive species, and the record decline in Arctic sea ice making the long-term survival of species such as ringed seals and polar bears uncertain.

Countless other wildlife species around the globe will be negatively affected as global warming destabilizes ecosystems unless we act quickly to change the root causes.