“Habitat loss is becoming apparent”
Geoff York, senior director of research and policy, Polar Bears International
Geoff York joined Polar Bears International (PBI) in 2014. He has more than 33 years of Arctic field experience, including 14 consecutive years researching polar bears in Alaska’s Chukchi and Southern Beaufort seas. In addition, he’s conducted polar bear research projects in Canada, Russia, and Norway (Svalbard), from population surveys to den research.
Table of content
- What sparked your interest in polar bears?
- What is their role in the ecosystem, and why are they considered iconic?
- What is the status of the current population of polar bears in Svalbard?
- How has it changed over time?
- How does a day in the life of a polar bear look like?
- How do polar bears in Svalbard interact with their environment?
- How can you avoid attracting them?
- What are the key factors that influence them?
- Are polar bears intelligent?
- Are there any unique behaviors exhibited by Svalbard bears?
- Have they adapted to the human presence?
- What does this mean to “disturb” polar bears?
- What do you think of the environmental protection measures in Svalbard?
- What are the main threats to polar bears globally?
- Is there progress made in conservation efforts to protect polar bears?
- Are there any discoveries that have surprised you?
- Do you have any memorable encounters with Svalbard bears?
- What is your message to people exploring Svalbard?
What sparked your interest in polar bears?
Honestly, it was pure chance. I was living in Alaska, working on a statewide marine mammal project, and had the opportunity to help with some field studies on polar bears. I immediately became hooked. Twenty-six years later, I’m still hooked.
What is their role in the ecosystem, and why are they considered iconic?
The first part is easy: they’re the top predators in the ecosystem.
As to why they are iconic, bears of all kinds have always played a significant role in human belief systems, going back to ancient Greek and Roman times and further back still with traditional and Indigenous peoples.
To Native people in the Arctic, polar bears are often seen as a close relative in the animal world. We’re almost primed to regard bears with equal parts fascination and fear. I think that is why humans consider polar bears a powerful symbol of the Arctic ecosystem.
What is the status of the current population of polar bears in Svalbard?
The current population in Svalbard appears to be stable following recovery, or partial recovery, from significant overhunting going back many decades prior to their protection from hunting in 1972.
How has it changed over time?
The most recent population survey was conducted by the Norwegian Polar Institute in 2017. It estimated a total of about 973 polar bears, with 264 on land and 709 on the pack ice. These numbers are a slight increase from a study in 2004, which found a total of 685 bears. It’s important to note, however, that the 2017 estimate did not include bears on the pack ice in Russian waters, while the 2004 study did.
So essentially, on Svalbard, what we think we’re seeing is a population trying to recover – while being confronted with the impacts of climate change and resulting habitat loss. While these impacts are not yet apparent in Svalbard’s bears, given what we know from polar bears in other parts of the Arctic, longer ice-free periods and retreating pack ice will eventually limit the number of bears able to survive in the region.
Looking broadly at the Barents Sea subpopulation, what we appear to be seeing is a shift into what effectively may become two separate groups due to the lack of ice in and around Svalbard in recent years and the increasing distance from land to the main pack ice. The bulk of the Barents Sea bears live a pelagic life; they stay out on the pack ice and rarely come to shore.
On Svalbard there are two to three hundred bears that do the opposite. They stay on or very near the island, making a living by hunting seals close to shore. But as the Arctic warms, these “coastal bears” are facing longer ice-free periods that greatly shorten their hunting season. Surprisingly these bears have not abandoned their strategy of staying close to or on shore rather than following the retreating pack ice, which is moving farther and farther from shore in most years.
While on land, some coastal bears have adopted a strategy of finding novel calories like sea bird chicks, eggs, and reindeer. While these foods may fill the bellies of some individual bears, they lack the high-fat content that polar bears need and will not make a difference on a population level. Some lucky bears will find and feed on marine mammal carcasses. A handful may also hunt seals at active tidewater glacial fronts, substituting freshwater ice for sea ice.
How does a day in the life of a polar bear look like?
A polar bear day can include all 24 hours because polar bears can be active throughout the night. They have excellent eyesight and are not constrained by darkness.
But, day or night, the life of a polar bear is essentially one of always looking for food: so, they roam across the sea ice, following their noses in search of seals; they take advantage of weather opportunities for good hunting; and they take advantage of certain times of the year, like the spring and early summer, when seals are more easily available and they can feast and build up their fat reserves.
During times of lower food availability, during ice-free periods or during winter storms, they rest and conserve energy.
There are always exceptions, and some bears remain active in some areas during summer, attempting to offset the cost of foraging by finding novel calories like sea bird chicks, eggs, reindeer, and marine mammal carcasses. A handful of polar bears may also hunt at active tidewater glacial fronts, substituting freshwater ice for sea ice.
In regions where polar bears come ashore, most choose lowered states of activity to conserve energy until conditions improve for hunting or until they reach an energetic threshold and need to become more active.
How do polar bears in Svalbard interact with their environment?
Largely, polar bears explore their environment through their noses. All their senses are excellent, but their olfactory senses are their preferred way of learning what’s going on around them, so that’s primarily how they navigate their world.
While we know scent drives a lot of polar bear behavior, it’s challenging to quantify from what distance a polar bear can smell. It very much depends on the strength of the odor, the direction of the wind, and other environmental conditions. Anecdotally, we know it can be on the order of 50 km or more in the right conditions. We know this from following tracks out on the sea ice, dating a sudden directional change, and following that to a seal kill.
It’s interesting to be on an icebreaker and to see polar bears out exploring their icescape, because quite often their reaction will be ‘What the heck’s that?’. And they may come up to the ship to check it out. They’re highly curious. They’ll just see a ship as a novel thing that has all kinds of interesting smells. And they’re typically not afraid.
That curiosity can lead them to investigate cabins with strong food odors, Bears who have learned to associate cabins with food rewards or those with a higher risk tolerance (typically subadult bears) are more likely to be repeat offenders.
How can you avoid attracting them?
It’s best to keep a clean camp and to cook outdoors when possible. It’s also important to store food in airtight and bear-resistant containers (e.g., a metal drum with a secure ring seal) and remove all waste. Solar-powered electric fences and trip-wire alert systems are a great safety addition when in a fixed cabin and when camping. I would also strongly recommend anyone in polar bear country carry at least two deterrents: a long -range option like a pistol flare and a short-range option like a handheld marine flare.
Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals, which have a high fat content. The bears typically hunt seals by waiting by their breathing holes on the sea ice. When the seal surfaces for air, the polar bear uses its powerful paws and jaws to yank it from the water.
Polar bears also sometimes stalk seals that are resting on the sea ice. They will also seek out young walrus and feast on carcasses from stampede and drowning events (post storm). Adult walruses are fairly safe from polar bears unless injured or sick.
A polar bear can consume around 45 kg of seal blubber in a single sitting. They are fueled by fat from marine mammals, and when hunting is good and the bears are in good condition, they may eat only the seal’s blubber and skin, leaving the rest for scavengers like Arctic foxes, ravens, and other bears.
Adult bears require the equivalent of roughly one adult ringed seal every 10 days on average. A bearded seal can equal several ringed seals energetically and seal pups are of lower value, requiring the bears to eat more of them.
What are the key factors that influence them?
The impact of habitat loss in Svalbard, largely because of declines in snow and ice cover from human-caused climate change, is starting to become apparent. It’s leading to a divergence in strategies between the pelagic bears and the coastal bears.
In addition, we’ve seen it directly impact den site selection. Polar bears used to den on the southern islands of the archipelago. Now they’re denning as far away as Russia, Frans Josef Land, and Novaya Zemlya and are abandoning the southernmost parts of the Svalbard archipelago altogether. This is because changing ice conditions have made it hard for pregnant female polar bears to reach den sites in the southernmost parts of the archipelago.
Scientists responsible for overseeing polar bear population in Svalbard currently count all the bears who mostly remain within the archipelago as “Svalbard bears”. However, more recent genetics and movement data suggest there could be a split between north and south with little mingling.
Are polar bears intelligent?
Yes, they are highly intelligent and are quick learners. As far as how knowledge is transferred, we don’t know a lot. What we do know is that mothers teach their cubs to do what they’ve learned to be successful. And that can be positive behaviors, like where to find seals, how to hunt them successfully, and how to avoid large males. It also plays a role in whether a bear follows a pelagic or coastal strategy: cubs learn from their moms.
Unfortunately, it can also have negative consequences. There’s an example on Svalbard with a bear named Frost who became quite adept at raiding cabins. While many cabins are well kept and the owners either remove food or safely store it when not in use, some owners are not as careful.
Frost became interested in raiding cabins in part because some people were leaving food inside that was accessible to her. So, there were rewards for that behavior, and she passed that down to her cubs, who also became adept at cabin break-ins.
Sadly, three of her offspring escalated their interactions with people, eventually mauling two and killing one. Frost and her last cub also died secondary to interactions with people.
The story of Frost and her cubs is an example of why it is extremely important to manage food and food waste properly in polar bear territory, and to avoid attractants that can encourage and more importantly reward the kind of behavior that can end tragically for polar bears and people.
Carrying proper deterrents is important, too. There is some data showing that bears in general can become less sensitive to noisemakers like cracker shells and gunshots without a follow-up flare or a physical deterrent like a rubber baton. Well-designed trip wires are generally effective, but it is always best to have secondary systems. Ideally people would use trip wires and electric fencing together. The same holds true for deterrents. Ideally people would have long- and short-range options for different scenarios, especially for a surprise close encounter.
Are there any unique behaviors exhibited by Svalbard bears?
The one seen most often and most recently is an increase in predation attempts on reindeer as sea ice has retreated and bears have been forced to look for alternative prey. We assume it could occur elsewhere, but it’s on Svalbard that people have observed these events.
Unfortunately, this behavior is very energetically demanding for the polar bear, and reindeer provide much less energy than the polar bear’s typical high-fat seal prey. Numerous studies have shown that alternative food sources like reindeer may help some individual bears in the short-term but won’t help with the long-term survival of polar bears at the population level.
Have they adapted to the human presence?
The answer to that is mixed. Longyearbyen is Svalbard’s central residential area and is a great example for aspects of successful human-polar bear coexistence. The town has had surprisingly few encounters with polar bears historically.
I think that speaks to the work Longyearbyen has done, specifically with waste management. There aren’t a lot of rewards available to bears that come into town, and the town has an ongoing plan to make it less enticing for bears who get too close. Outside of town there have been more problems, and more work needs to be done to educate people about the importance of eliminating food rewards, along with guidance on other safety measures, like the use of nonlethal deterrents, including flare guns, noisemakers, and other less lethal short-range deterrent options.
What does this mean to “disturb” polar bears?
Disturbance is a very nuanced and complicated term when it comes to wildlife behavior. How can you discern biologically significant impacts to a species like the polar bear – an animal that we rarely see that we can’t speak to, and for which we have limited ways of measuring that biological significance?
There are different ways you can look at it. Take a seal turning its head. Is that a “disturbance?” Perhaps. Is it biologically meaningful? No, probably not at all. From a management perspective, we want to avoid or minimize biologically meaningful disturbances that have an energetic cost to the individual animal — things that could impact hunting success, foraging success, reproductive success etc.
From a values perspective, there is a question of whether we should bother animals at all. This should be left to others to decide as it depends on personal perception of our role in protecting the environment we live in.
That’s a long way of saying science can only bring us so far in setting policies, because cultural values and, in some instances, politics also play a role, but we can certainly do a much better job of helping to quantify what are biologically meaningful disturbances. This would take a combination of observational data ideally tied with movements data from collars or other tracking devices and new genetic tools like epigenetic studies that can give us a measure of stress.
We have a lot more research to do with polar bears with respect to the impacts of human activities of any kind. Studies of this kind are difficult to conduct but increasingly important in a changing Arctic. What we already begin to see from a snow scooter disturbance study led by the NP is that there is a lot of individual variation in bear tolerance to different potential stressors.
All that being said, bears, broadly speaking, are pretty resilient animals.
What do you think of the environmental protection measures in Svalbard?
We have a lot more work to do in understanding the potential impacts of tourism broadly and bear viewing specifically. We need data to make informed decisions on viewing-distance guidelines. Those distances will likely vary depending on how bears are being viewed, whether that’s on foot, on land, or from a boat. They may also vary in the time of year or the activity that the bear is engaged in when sighted and whether people are on foot, on a snowmobile, in a boat, or on a raised platform.
Seeing polar bears in the wild and learning about the challenges they face can inspire people to care for, and get involved in, their conservation. But we must also ensure that the bears aren’t disturbed in a biologically meaningful way, and that people and bears remain safe.
At PBI, we have started to gather information to inform future research on human impacts to help with setting science-based guidelines. We are currently surveying the findings from all previous studies on the impact of human activities and disturbances on black, brown, and polar bears. From there we will map out the work that needs to be done and will publish our findings and share them with interested parties, including management authorities, policymakers, tourism companies, Arctic guides, and others.
What are the main threats to polar bears globally?
Climate change and the resulting sea ice loss is by far the most serious issue facing polar bears. Sea ice in the Arctic is, on average, melting earlier in spring and forming later each fall, giving the bears less time to hunt seals and gather the energy they need to survive and reproduce.
Research on the best-studied populations shows the number of bears in some populations declining, body mass diminishing, and the number of cubs surviving to maturity also decreasing in direct correlation with sea ice loss. These impacts are expected to increase as the planet continues to warm. Without action to address greenhouse gas emissions, a 2020 study shows that we could lose all but a few polar bear populations by the end of the century.
Recently, a publication from Stroeve, et al. indicated that polar bears in Southern Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada, could be locally extinct as soon as 2030 if the Paris Climate Agreement is breached and we exceed 2 degrees of global warming. The Western Hudson Bay bears (the famous “Churchill bears”) would be close behind them.
Historically, overhunting was the greatest threat to polar bears. Bears on Svalbard and in places like northern Alaska were greatly reduced in numbers from the 1800s up through the 1960s by commercial and later sport hunters.
Their numbers rebounded in most places after the five polar bear nations signed the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears. The Agreement halted commercial hunting and significantly curtailed sport hunting.
Today, legal harvesting continues for Indigenous peoples in some countries, based on quota systems. (There are still a small number of sport hunts allowed in Canada, but they represent a small percentage of the overall take.) Sustainable hunts, in which harvest numbers are based on a population’s ability to regenerate, have long been an important part of indigenous cultural traditions and are part of subsistence lifestyles in some regions. (It’s worth noting that while some of these Indigenous quota systems allow for trade in polar bear pelts, demand has declined significantly in recent years and prices have plummeted, leading to limited activity on this front.)
Ensuring these hunts remain sustainable requires vigilance. At the 2024 meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, held in June in Seattle, my colleagues and I expressed concerns about the recent move by Nunavut, Canada, to change its harvest ratio from a 2:1 male-female ratio to 1:1. Not only is this not sustainable in current practice, but it also affects roughly two-thirds of the global population of polar bears.
Other threats to the bears include pollution, commercial disturbances, conflicts with people as the bears spend more time onshore due to melting sea ice, unregulated or poorly regulated tourism, and disease.
Is there progress made in conservation efforts to protect polar bears?
Stopping the commercial hunting of polar bears in the 1970s is the most important success to date.
More recently, I would give a nod to the waste management practices in Longyearbyen. Norway is heading in the right direction in terms of strengthening coexistence between people and bears, but still has room for improvement. Specifically, it would be helpful to increase the options for short-range deterrents and allow the use of proven bear-safe tools like bear spray.
The overarching challenge to polar bears is, of course, human-caused climate change. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical to ensuring their future. This is an international problem, beyond the scope of one nation — but we all need to do our part. Norway, for example, has set a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2030 and leads the world in electrifying its automotive fleet.
Arctic guides can play a key role in helping to inspire action. Visitors to Svalbard are privileged to see a unique and stunningly beautiful part of the world. What’s more, some have the leadership positions or financial resources to make a difference back home. By sharing information on the changes taking place, Arctic guides can motivate guests to return home and get involved in helping to push for meaningful climate action once home.
Are there any discoveries that have surprised you?
A couple comes to mind. One is the discovery that bears in east Greenland are behaviorally adapting to changes in sea ice by shifting to use of freshwater glacial front ice to hunt seals there. They are doing what they normally do on sea ice, but on glacial ice. So far, it’s only really been documented scientifically in a specific east Greenland fiord, although there are reports of this behavior in places like Tryghamna in Svalbard.
There is also a new study from the University of Manitoba showing that a warming climate is causing polar bears to age faster. The example the authors give is that it is much like you see with our national leaders going into office with dark hair and coming out in four years with gray hair. Environmental stress is actually causing the bears to age more rapidly than bears that have more stable sea ice conditions.
Do you have any memorable encounters with Svalbard bears?
One experience that stands out was being with colleagues from the Norwegian Polar Institute, and traversing through what to me was slush ice. We wouldn’t consider trying to stand on it; it was super thin, brand-new ice. But we looked out at this thin layer of gray slush ice and saw polar bear tracks.
I would never have thought from my years of experience in Alaska that bears would be able to stay on top of ice like that. We know they swim through it and swim under it and poke their heads up. But to see tracks go across ice of that fineness was amazing and speaks to how they can spread themselves out, using their massive paws as snowshoes, and distribute their weight.
What is your message to people exploring Svalbard?
I think for those of us privileged to come to the High Arctic, to see the beauty of the place, to experience some of the species that live there, that we have a duty when we go home to be active in the conservation of those places and those species.
It’s incumbent on us to share what we see, to learn more about what’s impacting those places, and to do what we can to spread the word in our own spheres, whether it’s personal or through our work, to help protect and preserve these remarkable places and their fauna and flora.
Guides have a unique opportunity to connect with visitors from all over the world. And passionate, well-informed guides can inspire these guests to return to their communities and make a difference. Svalbard is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, and visitors can bear witness to this rapid change.
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Last update: 17. October 2024