Friday, February 25, 2011

Alaska's coordinator for endangered species: "Polar bears are at an all-time high of abundance level"

Debate: Polar Bear’s Status Roils Alaska
"Polar bears are at an all-time high of abundance level," said Doug Vincent-Lang, the state's coordinator for endangered species. "The only reason the service listed them was based on speculation from fairly untested models based on what the fate of polar bears may be in the future

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The correct terminology is that they have exceeded the 'carrying capacity' of their environment. Some speculate that is what the Aztecs did and that they resorted to cannibalism as a source of protein in their diet.

suomi43 said...

The Polar Bear Popuation according to the WWF, the norwegian Polar Institute and other organizations (I collected the data regionally off the internet)is approximately 33,500 to 35,500 bears.

Considering that they are an alpha predator living in a barren wasteland - the only question is - are there too many of them?

Anonymous said...

Barren wasteland? It's ice, it's not waste -- and there's no shortage of life, most of it simply resides underwater and happens to be seasonal.

Seals, walruses, birds, arctic foxes, whales..

Anonymous said...

How could the various organizations report the population of bears at 33.5 to 35.5 thousand and the Polar Bear Specialized Group report the population at 20 to 25 thousand? That is a huge discrepancy in the 2 sets of data!

SFTor said...

Suomi43:

No, there are not too many polar bears.

They eat seals, and there are more seals than you can shake a club at.