Polar Bear

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.

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.