Twenty Six Thousand Bears, Counted as Nineteen Separate Populations

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the global polar bear population at 26,000 individuals as of 2023, but that single number hides a structure worth explaining. The species is not managed or counted as one continuous population. FWS recognizes nineteen distinct subpopulations spread across the ice covered waters of the Arctic and Subarctic, and the United States contains portions of only two of them, a reminder that most of the species' range spans other Arctic nations, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia, rather than the United States alone. The bear is protected in the United States under two overlapping federal laws, the Endangered Species Act, under which the Service continues to classify it as a threatened species because of the loss of its sea ice habitat, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which generally prohibits taking a polar bear with a specific exception preserved for harvest by Alaska Native communities. Nineteen subpopulations under one global count, spread across five nations, managed under two different laws in the United States alone: the bureaucratic structure surrounding this species mirrors the physical one it depends on, one continuous range of sea ice that nonetheless breaks into separate, unevenly monitored pieces the moment anyone tries to manage it.