I am a polar bear living in the very cold Arctic. I have white fur and I’m big and heavy, because I need a lot of fat to stay warm in the frigid temperatures here! Also, I’m very good at swimming and at hunting to get food for myself. Using my big incisors, I can bite onto prey and get them out to eat. I mostly eat seals to make sure I have enough fat to survive. I spend my days walking on the ice, swimming, and hunting, which is sometimes difficult because my prey gets away. My life is usually nice, but if everything was perfect, I would always have enough food to eat and the ice wouldn’t be drifting and melting away.
Me struggling to live on melting ice.
I am an endangered animal, and the reason for that has been caused by different things around me. Humans and environmental factors are making me endangered, and I’ll talk about the humans first. Sometimes when I spend longer time onshore, I run into Arctic coastal communities, and when we interact, they try to get rid of me, but I’ve thankfully gotten away. Unfortunately, polar bears who were not as lucky as me were killed by the people working in the communities. I know a lot of humans are trying to help us, but sometimes it’s not enough, because there are still illegal hunters trying to get me and other polar bears. If we are still being hunted, that means our population could still be going down, and this scares me a lot. Adding to that, people are starting to increase the oil drilling in the Arctic, and I could possibly die if I came in contact with spilled oil. Even with all of this human interference, there are still more environmental problems that have caused us polar bears to become endangered. A huge problem is global warming. Global warming has caused large amounts of ice to melt, so I have to travel further to find good places to stay. Maybe people don’t realize how important polar bears actually are, but we are the top of the food chain, and if we are gone, the overall marine environment could be damaged.
This picture shows the 19 subpopulations of polar bears in the Arctic. Hopefully the polar bear population can grow so that the area we cover becomes larger! Just because there are a lot of things making polar bears endangered doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to turn things around to save us. For stopping people from killing polar bears to protect their Arctic communities, there are already methods of doing this. Humans have been using better lighting near public places, electric fencing, bear-proof food storage containers to make sure they can see us if we are coming near where they are. Then, we will leave without getting hurt or hurting people. But, if we do get too close to the humans, they should use something like pepper spray to keep us away rather than killing us. I’d rather have my face sting than be killed! The humans need to keep using these methods in all of their Arctic communities so that the polar population doesn’t have to decrease even more. Also, people need to stop the negative industrial impacts coming from oil drilling and such. To do this, they need to make sure their technique of oil drilling is well managed so that oil isn’t likely to spill out. They also need to make sure that they do not drill in ecologically fragile places. By doing these things, polar bears like me will be more protected from the danger of oil drilling. Now, with global warming, it’s hard for people to save us from this big of an environmental problem. However, they can work with the biggest area of ice there is right now, in the High Arctic of Canada and Greenland, and manage it well and create a good habitat there so I can live well. This way, other polar bears and I don’t have to worry about traveling to many places to stay. If the humans do all of these things, polar bears will be in for a comeback from being endangered.
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