Polar bears that can survive without sea ice | Hacker News Reader

Polar bears that can survive without sea ice

nature.com

93 pointsgmays66 comments

By using ice that is calving from glaciers.

They're still hunting from ice that's even rarer than sea ice, and disappearing just as quickly. A population hunting exclusively on land would have been a lot more noteworthy.

Yeah.

Probably, a better hope is that polar bears are interbreeding with other species, like brown bears. The answer may not be the preservation of polar bears but the emergence of a new species.

Similarly: Coyotes, wolves and dogs interbreeding and lions that learned to hunt sea animals in some part of Africa where there is insufficient game on land.

Agreed, no wonder they waited until later in the article to reveal that the trick was simply... more ice

> But the isolated sub-population has found a way to hunt without sea ice. The group, consisting of 27 adult females, has adapted to hunting on the ice that has calved off glaciers — called glacial mélange. The research team used genetic analysis to learn that this population has been isolated from other polar bear populations along Greenland’s east coast for at least 200 years.

Well, that might give them a few extra generations but it sounds like a recipe for mutational meltdown in the long run

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown

Polar bear populations are not crashing. They're declining in some areas, stable in others, and actually increasing in some areas too[1].

Polar bears are smart, adaptable, omnivores who are lucky enough to live in areas with relatively low human populations. They'll probably weather climate change better than a lot of species.

[1]https://www.arcticwwf.org/wildlife/polar-bear/polar-bear-pop...

I don't understand all the negative comments. Because it seems indeed to be the case that Polar bears are not doing that bad over the last 20 years [1]. Is climate warming a problem for Polar bears? Yes, definitely! But much less than we think. By far the biggest cause of the decline of Polar bears in the last century has been hunting. Only when Polar bears were put on the endangered list, and hunting was reduced, the Population have been increasing again. [3] Now that Polar bears are not hunted anymore, the melting ice becomes their prime problem. But Polar bears have survived warming climates in the past [4]. They are smart animals that have adapted to many different climates in the past and one could, arguably, assume that they could survive this one as well [5]. I'm not saying that it doesn't matter if the North pole melts. But it seems not to be as big of a treat for Polar bears as we believe it is.

[1] - https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula...

[2] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Annual-estimates-of-the-...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Hunting

[4] - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528754-600-hardy-po...

[5] - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210506109

They are marine mammals, though. Your link says that their numbers are projected to decline by 30% by 2050.

They're very good swimmers, but they still need a place to sleep. They're smart and adaptable, but they are also ambush predators with bright white fur who need a lot of calories and mostly eat seafood.

I remember reading about a bear classed as a link between brown bears and polar bears. Post mortem, under a grinning hunters foot. I remember wondering if he had killed the first and only hybrid that would have bridged the gap for a doomed species. Melodramatic perhaps. Actually I see there is a wiki! It seems there is one way gene flow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly–polar_bear_hybrid

My understanding is that those are not particularly uncommon, and that they're being hunted to prevent hybridization from occurring.

But I don't know what we think the world is going to look like in 10,000 years if we keep making species extinct and stopping them from re-integrating with their close relatives. Completely new species aren't going to pop up in that time. It's just going to be new specializations of existing ones. And if we keep going this way, everything is going to turn into houseflies and rodents.

I'm under the impression Polar Bears are kinda-sorta just a special case of Brown Bears.

There's a black bear mutation for white fur that's common enough that 'Spirit Bears' are a thing in local culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermode_bear

I know what you're all thinking. I'm thinking it too. This is a huge relief. The polar bears won't be wiped out after all. We can now get back to our planned polar ice cap melt. Why go to Florida when you can bring Florida to you!? /s

It seems we’re looking for anything to make us feel better. It’s like living in a live action Don’t Look Up.

I think we should create a polar bear preserve in Antarctica in an isolated area away from penguins

The problem is that bears can swim.

To enclose 1000Km of open sea in a "storm-proof, crushing-iceberg proof, bear-proof" barrier to keep penguins out and bears in would be... a defiant task.

If we put polar bears in Antarctica, sooner or later we'll have polar bears roaming in Argentina.

user249 says>"I think we should create a polar bear preserve in Antarctica in an isolated area away from penguins"<

FTFY:

I think we should create a polar bear preserve in Antarctica in an isolated area away from penguins and humans.

Well yes of course. I'm envisioning a park with natural and human-made barriers to keep them in their area. We already manage large predators in the lower 48 states of the US by tracking and monitoring wolves and grizzlies. If it's a choice between polar bears going extinct at the North Pole and surviving comfortably at the South Pole, I'd choose the latter.

Antarctica does not have polar bears, introducing a apex predators to a balanced environment is not a good idea.

That's exactly what a penguin would say.

We here in the US have apex predators in the Rocky Mountains (grizzlies, wolves) so I don't see how this is a blocking issue

Because those ecosystems have existed with those predators for thousands/millions of years and have balanced themselves.

Imagine bringing cold-resistant crocodiles to the Rockies and how much that’d shake up the ecosystem.

An apex predator is only an apex predator in absence of a bigger, more dangerous predator.

This sort of idea has a long history of catastrophic failures resulting in species extinctions.

Bears are big enough that we can easily kill all of them in a few seasons.

Wouldn't be the first time...

Right. This is proven technology!

Let's put some polar bears on Antarctica

but not without ice. without that camouflage, harder to catch enough food to survive.

It's always astonishing to me that this world is still so unexplored that we can discover an entire population of polar bears in 2022. They're literally one of the biggest animals, how did we miss them?

We lose humans 400 feet away from hiking trails all the time. The fact that we lose polar bears in the Arctic is not that surprising.

[Mildly exaggerated] It's astonishing to you that we don't have Star Trek/Orville(s03e03 is actually pretty great, watch it!)-type planet-level sensors capable of creating complete inventories of biological lifeforms of a particular type on our planet? :)

Where is the value for shareholders in that

to support big game hunters

Don't need Star-trek tech for that, just people who can move about and there are plenty of those.

People tend to dislike moving about in places where ice bears roam, so there are not very many who do.

Also, how would you know they're part of an isolated population unless you spend time (and money) collecting samples, doing genetic analysis, tracking movement, and observing behavior? And don't forget, having a bunch of researchers running around is going to affect the bears' behavior and introduce some uncertainty into the observations.

We also only just discovered a city of 1.5 million penguins!

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/a-previously-unknown-....

I imagine the phrase "like finding polar bears in a snow storm" caught on :P.

Jokes aside, there is so much of the world that's unoccupied for various reasons. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/these-maps-show-how-e...

I imagine we're missing a lot, especially if you factor in deep ocean and jungle

The population is 27 bears on an island 2.1 million square kilometers large.

They are too busy tracking what you do online...

Mostly because we're not looking. I believe that if there were money in knowing where every polar bear is, we could solve that engineering problem. But there really isn't?

So my answer is essentially: "capitalism".

You mean Coca Cola doesn’t do this ?

The HN title should reflect Nature's: "Polar bear population discovered that can survive without sea ice"

These are not polar bears that have adapted to the current, rapid loss of sea ice due largely to anthropogenic climate change. This is colony of polar bears that have been living in the same unusually small territory for 200 years due to some other reason. Currently there are 27 of them. They still hunt from ice, which has calved off a glacier, but they don't stray far from their terriroty.

All the other polar bears in the Artic, who hunt from sea ice and travel extensively, are severely under treat due to loss of habitat.

I changed the title because people were misparsing the original and complaining about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782159.

I don't see how the changed title carries the implication you're objecting to, so have left it for now.

It seems bizarre to framing this as something bears discovered about themselves, rather than something scientists discovered about bears. It's not like anybody actually asked bears what the bears know.

I initially read it as:

> Polar bear population discovered that [they] can survive without sea ice

But now I think it's supposed to be:

> Polar bear population [was] discovered that can survive without sea ice

The latter still seems awkward to me. Is it even grammatically correct?

Yes, the latter is correct given the unique grammatical conventions of newspaper headlines. These sorts of headlines are called "crash blossoms": https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage...

Think you're reading the headline wrong there my friend. 'discovered' is passive in this sentence. [A] Polar bear population [has been] discovered [by researchers] that can survive without sea ice.

the perils of headline-syntax

Why is this surprising to intelligent scientists? Common sense says that unless the bears eat the ice and it's their only source of a critical resource (nutrients?) then of course the bears will find a work around.

Did they really think the bears would just give up and die if the ice all melted?

Is not so simple. Polar bears migrate to avoid the harsh season.

To survive, they need to cross a chilling open sea that is all except calm. They can swim for more than a week and more than 650Km non stop. This is what grants them the tag of marine mammals, and is well earned.

Finding a chunk of ice to rest and sleep in this travel can be the difference between surviving (at coast of a 20% of its fat reserves) or drowning in the sea, specially for cubs that often die in the travel. Less and less floating icebergs mean less bears surviving, until none will be able to swim so far without help. And then you have a big chunk of the population vanished in a couple of months.

"Polar bear population discovered that can survive with little sea ice"

What polar bears "need to survive" either is misunderstood, or these bears have evolved.

Either way, scientistific claims need to be questioned, because to the common person it's obvious that bears will adapt, and that "needing sea ice" to survive is a simplistic notion.

The problem with what common person feel as obvious is that is based in common person knowledge. People is often unable to see (or refuse to see) the whole picture about a field that they don't master. It does not mean if is informatics, or ecology.

To start, the title in HN is misleading.

Without access to the full article, I can't really discuss the job, but I have a few mental questions to myself that would need to be addressed. Maybe they are discussed in the article, maybe not.

If all known populations of bears appear in areas with at least a little of sea ice, and none in areas without sea ice; I think that the answer to the question "would polar bears survive if the sea ice vanishes?" is not difficult to deduce.

In any case the last lines of the link: "correction, we didn't mean to say that polar bears can survive without sea-ice" are self-explanatory.

You might want to read beyond the headline.

+1. Totally agree. Nowhere in the article does anyone seem "surprised". If you are going to project a response on the scientists it would probably be relief or concern.

...and what r u projecting here? ...a concerned mother?

If I understand correctly, ice does supply a critical resource to polar bears - cooling.

I'm sure you already know that animals, including humans, die due to changes in their environment. So what do you mean here?

yes,, death it is part of the evolution

whats ur point?

Feel free to take part in evolution yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it. I feel no allegiance to evolution as a cause or god; it's just a natural process.

Polar bears need sea ice to hunt or their prey needs sea ice to evade them? Surely those seals will have to resort to resting on land instead, if there's no ice?

While people wring their hands, the polar bear population continues to climb https://climateataglance.com/climate-at-a-glance-polar-bears...

Garbage article. The only sources mentioned were authored by Susan J Crawford, who has conducted no primary research and whose means of sustaining herself appears to be misinterpreting other researchers' work and blogging about it. Here are responses from the primary researchers who wrote the papers she references: https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/financial-post-publis...

OK, turns out their population trend is unknown but possible stable.

> While people wring their hands

Ridiculing people demonstrates, IME, that your own argument has nothing stronger to support it.

"Feel free to take part in evolution yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it."

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