The most heartbreaking polar bear picture, ever

[n2doc]

BY JESS ZIMMERMAN
1 DEC 2011 3:34 PM


I don't know if this guy is actually trying to push this icebreaker ship away from his home. Maybe he just thinks there's a free buffet if he can climb aboard. But in the context of the polar bears' plight, with their numbers dwindling due to climate change and habitat loss, this looks like a heartbreaking picture of a lone bear trying to hold back the inevitable. UGH MAKE IT STOP.

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-12-01-the-most-heartbreaking-polar-bear-picture-ever

[CrispyQ]

1. We don't deserve this planet. --nt

[TheCowsCameHome]

3. That sums it up. n/t

[jpak]

2. I spent many months on an icebeaker in the Arctic, when parked in the ice, the smell from the galley

brought in bears from all over.

We had to pull in the gangplank when no one was on the ice to keep the bears from boarding the vessel.

[stuntcat]

4. It should just be the ice and the bears there. and some seals to eat. and some birds & fish.

I'm horrified of the things I have to watch happen my next few decades.
How do so many people carry on smiling all day like everything's okay?
How can people keep giving new babies the rest of the century?
Compassion for anything besides humans is being bred out of people.

I'm sorry to let this out. I just don't know one single person who minds what we're doing to the animals. So I'm alone and typing at no one. I have such a headache.

[hatrack]

5. Oh, I'll go you one better than that - and this was five years ago

Abandoned by the mothers too far offshore to swim back to land, walrus calves would likely succumb to starvation and drowning. (Photo by Phil Alatalo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Stepping aboard the U. S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy to explore the Arctic Ocean, Carin Ashjian expected to ride the sea’s winds and swells, but not an emotional roller coaster. In spring and summer of 2004, Ashjian and colleagues were investigating the potential impacts of a warming climate on the delicately balanced Arctic Ocean ecosystem, when they discovered an unexpected phenomenon: nine sightings of baby walruses swimming alone far from shore—apparently abandoned by their nursing mothers.

“The young can’t forage for themselves and are dependent on their mothers’ milk for up to two years,” said Ashjian, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The lone calves, about two months old and too far offshore to swim back to land, would likely succumb to starvation and drowning, the researchers concluded.

“We would sail up to a particular location and stay there for 24 hours at a time, and one or two of these pups would swim up to us, and the poor little guys would just bark at us for hours on end,” Ashjian said. “It was really awful. I wouldn’t go outside.”


Adult walruses forage for clams, snails, crabs, worms, and other invertebrate animals on the shallow seafloor of the continental shelf, diving to depths of no more than 656 feet (200 meters). Walrus mothers leave their calves on sea ice while they dive, returning to nurse them. In short, walruses depend on sea ice that usually persists above shallow nearshore waters in summers, and in 2004, the ice disappeared. The researchers observed a mass of water as warm as 44°F (7°C) over the continental shelves of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas—more than six degrees higher than temperatures measured in the same region in 2002. Sampling with plankton nets, they found zooplankton species characteristic of warmer, more southern waters.

EDIT

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12316&tid=282&cid=13087