This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Call the polar bear a land animal and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will correct you. Its species profile places the bear across the circumpolar Arctic, primarily above the Arctic Circle, inside nineteen recognized subpopulations spread through the seasonally and permanently ice covered marine waters of the Arctic and Subarctic. That habitat description, marine waters rather than tundra, is not a technicality. It explains how the bear feeds. FWS states it preys heavily on ringed seals, taking bearded seals less often, and turns to larger prey such as walruses and belugas, or to whale remains, when they are available, all of it hunted from the surface of the sea ice rather than chased down on open ground. A hunting strategy built entirely around a frozen platform is also a hunting strategy with a single point of failure: when the ice that platform depends on thins or breaks up early, the bear loses the thing that makes every part of that diet reachable. FWS manages the polar bear under two federal protections in the United States, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the second of which classifies it, correctly, as a marine mammal rather than a terrestrial one, with a narrow exception carved out for harvest by Alaska Native communities. The United States manages portions of two of the nineteen global subpopulations, a small share of a species whose real range circles the whole top of the planet.