Photo: Madison Stevens. Living with Polar Bears People in the Arctic have coexisted with polar bears for thousands of years. Photo: KT Miller. The Circumpolar North Over 4 million people live in the Arctic today. United States. Indigenous Knowledge. IK is currently threatened by colonization and globalization. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Subsistence Lifestyle.
Climate Warming. Continue Reading. Threats to Polar Bears Sea ice loss from climate warming is the overarching threat to polar bears. Join us on our journey. Become part of a community committed to protecting polar bears with our free newsletter. Sign Up Now. That means hunting seal and caribou for food and skins, and going out in the dead of winter in search of nanuq, the polar bear. They do it for the meat, which goes to their families and friends and elders, and for the hide, which makes pants or parkas.
Instead of dog teams, they drive snowmobiles, with plastic tarps securing wooden food boxes, synthetic equipment bags, caribou-hide blankets, ropes and tuuq, a spear-like ice chisel. Rather than the bear harpoon of old, each has a high-caliber rifle. They head out on frozen Frobisher Bay, with the lights of Iqaluit, the Nunavut capital, disappearing behind them. Hours later, the sun will reach its apex just over the horizon and start to descend behind mountains and glaciers.
Mike sips hot tea in the cold that reaches 31 degrees below zero as she gazes across the turquoise tundra ice. Kango and Philip, both in their 50s, have hunted bear together for more than a decade, using skills learned from an uncle when they were children.
For Mike, 36, this is the first nanniaq, though she has had a lifetime of seal and caribou hunting. In their fur-lined, insulated parkas and pants, with sealskin or modern boots up to their knees and gloves of wolf or beaver, they look much like their ancestors. The men have thick torsos with strong, work-worn hands and muscular forearms. Their faces are broad and round, and each has a mustache but no beard.
Mike is smaller, with the same copper skin and dark hair. On the second afternoon, a rifle shot echoes across the tundra. Now Philip comes scurrying back toward the others, snowmobile careening like a water bug on ice. Global warming models predict seasonal sea ice in Baffin Bay will continue to decline.
And over the next three generations of bears about 35 years , the Baffin Bay polar bear population is expected to mirror this decline, through reduced body size, reduced litters, and possibly reduced numbers. But for now, researchers say the Baffin Bay polar bear population is relatively abundant, something that comes as no surprise to Inuit in the region who have lived with the bears for thousands of years. The Baffin Bay polar bears inhabit approximately one million square kilometres of land and sea encompassing Baffin Bay, and portions of Baffin Island, all of Bylot Sound, and parts of west and northwest Greenland.
Their population is stable at about 2, animals, and appears to have been stable for a while. This population estimate was not a direct result of Laidre's study, but was included in the report's research. Inuit in the region have long argued that the Baffin Bay polar bear population was healthy, and maybe even growing. They have been making that argument, based on their observations, against the science of the day for at least 10 years.
Those hearings blamed a supposed decline in the polar bear population on overhunting , saying the combined hunt in Greenland and Nunavut was not sustainable. Stephen Atkinson, one of the study's co-authors, and now a contract wildlife biologist who has spent close to 30 years studying polar bears, cautioned against comparing the latest population estimate with the earlier. The difference between Svalbard and other polar bear habitats, he says, is that hunting has been banned there since Recent estimates by U.
Geological Survey scientists predict that because of melting sea ice , up to two-thirds of all polar bears will be lost by All rights reserved. Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife natgeo. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants.
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