The latest news from the Great White North:
Polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay risk starvation as the climate crisis lengthens periods without Arctic Sea ice, despite the creatures’ willingness to expand their diets.
Polar bears use the ice that stretches across the ocean surface in the Arctic during colder months to help them access their main source of prey – fatty ringed and bearded seals.
In the warmer months when the sea ice recedes, they would be expected to conserve their energy and even enter a hibernation-like state.
But human-caused climate change is extending this ice-free period in parts of the Arctic – which is heating between two and four times faster than the rest of the world – and forcing the polar bears to spend more and more time on land.
New research looking at 20 polar bears in Hudson Bay suggests that without sea ice they still try to find food.
OK, this could be true. We’re certainly not saying that it isn’t. However, we just want to put a little warning down.
Pictures of starving polar bears won’t be proof that it is happening.
Which might seem a little odd but bear (sorry) with us.
End of life for an apex predator is not a happy time. After a life eating everything else there’s nothing that does come eat you once you’ve lost a pace. End of life for an apex predator is, likely enough, therefore starvation when the ability to hunt goes.
We also know that polar bear populations have expanded massively in recent decades.
We would therefore expect to be seeing more starving polar bears - that end of life fate of so many apex predators.
There’s also that larger point. The population of apex predators is kept in check by the plenitude of the prey species. Once that predator species reaches full exploitation of the food source then it is indeed starvation which keeps it in check.
Seeing, pictures of, or finding starving polar bears will not, therefore, be proof of this contention that climate change ice loss is causing polar bears to starve. Sure, such evidence might well be consistent with that contention, isn’t proof against it, but it’s not proof of it.
As with more whales washing up on beaches being consistent with ships, or seabed development noise from windfarms, or whatever, killing whales. It’s also consistent with, something we should expect to see in fact, from the truly massive expansion - and a righteous expansion too - in whale populations in recent decades.
Evidence is indeed evidence but the big question is always, well, evidence of what?
We would suggest, ever so gently, that some who might try to mislead us will use pictures of starving polar bears to insist upon the verity of that contention - that climate change induced ice loss is starving them. As we say, this could be true. But we need rather more proof than pictures of starving polar bears to prove it.