Media biased on polar bears

Dear editor: Re: “Polar bears have tougher time hunting, new photographic research confirms,” by The Canadian Press (Daily Courier, Feb. 2).

Once again the editor of the Daily Courier fails the public by reflexively publishing an extremely biased CP article about polar bears without consulting B.C.’s resident expert, Dr. Susan Crockford, of UVic. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on polar bears having studied them for some 35 years.

The fact of the matter is, the “experts” cited in the article deliberately omitted, that in the 1970s there was a “devastating loss of ring seal prey and thus a decline of polar bears in the Beaufort Sea area – due to ice that was too thick in places needed for the seals to successfully raise their pups.”

I quote Dr. Crockford: “However, as you’ll see by the sea ice thickness maps below, there may be good reason for the lack of ringed seal lairs, and a general lack of seals except at the nearshore lead that forms because of tidal action: the ice just a bit further offshore ice looks too thick for a good crop of ringed seals in all three years of the study.

“This is reminiscent of conditions that occurred with devastating results in the mid-1970s and mid-2000s (Burns et al. 1975; Cherry et al. 2009; Harwood et al. 2012, 2015; Pilfold et al. 2012; Stirling 2002, Stirling et al. 1987). Those events affected primarily bears in the eastern half of the Southern Beaufort and were almost certainly responsible for the recorded decline in SB bear numbers in the 2001-2010 survey (Bromaghin et al. 2015; Crockford 2017; Crockford and Geist 2018).

“It seems very odd to me that Pagano and colleagues suggested no reasons for the unexpectedly poor showing of polar bear hunting success during their study except a bit of hand-waving about higher-than-we-thought metabolic rates in the bears.”

Right along the coast of Alaska where the Courier article referenced, the U.S. Navy reported ice was up to five metres thick making it almost impossible for seals to whelp there.

In fact, if the Daily Courier cared to do some research there are many online websites showing the amount and thickness of Arctic sea ice over the last decade.

And they would discover that this winter so far is about 75 per cent of the longer term average with about eight weeks left to accumulate more.

The media, which used to do at least a modicum of research on their own, has betrayed the public with politically motivated, biased, one-sided regurgitation of questionable value. Jim Church Kelowna