After nearly 30 years of dangling from the windows of helicopters buzzing low over Arctic sea ice, world-renowned polar bear expert Steven C. Amstrup ’75 is trading in his tranquilizer gun for a laptop and the lecture circuit.
Amstrup, a recently retired wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, is legendary in conservation circles for his work with polar bears.
He led the 19-member international scientific team whose nine reports convinced former Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne, in 2008, to list polar bears as a threatened species, which granted them special protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Long before that, he was the first scientist ever to successfully follow the movements of polar bears with radio-tracking collars. They’re a tough fit, he said, laughing: “Even now we cannot radio-collar adult male polar bears because their necks are bigger than their heads. They’re kinda shaped like traffic cones.”
His legacy to date? Conducting, analyzing and interpreting a career’s worth of comprehensive field work to unravel such polar bear mysteries as population sizes and boundaries, den locations, year-round movement patterns, mortality rates and, perhaps most importantly, their dependence on sea ice. [Continue Reading...]
The iconic creatures still evoke wonder.
“After observing and capturing hundreds of polar bears over a 30-year career – weighing them and measuring them and following them by telemetry – the first bear sighting of every field season still invokes a feeling of ‘Holy s‒, there’s a real wild polar bear!’ I’ve never grown tired of seeing them. And I haven’t lost the sense of awe they inspire,” he wrote in a recent email.
An aptly timed prize
In September, Amstrup received the world’s highest wildlife conservation honor – the biennial Indianapolis Prize – for his lifetime’s work. The peer-nominated, peer-selected recipient is chosen for: significant achievements to conserve an animal species, measurable outcomes, quality science, total years of unselfish dedication to their cause, and cooperation with zoos and other conservation organizations.
Michael Crowther, president and CEO of the Indianapolis Zoo, which bestows the prize, compares the award’s prestige in the wildlife conservation world as the Oscars, the Emmys and the Tonys all rolled into one. Past winners include: George Archibald, International Crane Foundation; George Schaller, Wildlife Conservation Society; and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Save the Elephants. “I am so incredibly honored,” said Amstrup. “You go into this kind of work because you want to make a difference. This prize is the biggest affirmation possible that my peers believe I have done so.”
The lumbering and much-beloved subjects of his work have been dubbed “Arctic canaries.” Like the canaries carried at the turn-of-the-century by underground coal miners to detect poisonous gases, the polar bear’s fate is inextricably linked to ours. “As the polar bear goes, so go we,” Amstrup said.
His recognition couldn’t have come at a more critical time, he said, because there’s trouble brewing on top of the world.
“The Arctic is a different place than it was in the ’80s when I started my research up there. The sea ice now retreats way offshore in the summer. Whereas it used to be right along the shore, now the sea ice is several hundred miles offshore at its maximum retreat in summer,” he said.
That’s problematic because every aspect of a polar bear’s life depends on predictable, normal ebbs and flows of stable sea ice, he explained. The pack ice is the platform upon which polar bears travel, where they breed and sometimes even den. Most importantly, it’s the substrate that supports the Arctic marine food web and that allows the polar bear access to that food web. Polar bears live on top of the sea ice and at the apex of a food web built upon the smaller organisms living on and under the surface of the ice.
“But now, the sea ice retreats earlier in the year and comes back later. Our research findings show this is having a profound effect on polar bears,” Amstrup said.
Not only is the ice retreating, it is first disappearing from the preferred habitats. “Polar bears used to hang out in the near-shore ice over the productive continental shelf waters throughout summer; now they retreat to the distant pack ice where productivity is low and where we believe they are largely food-deprived because of low access to seals.”
“We’re seeing a cast of ecological changes as the ice retreats, including major changes in distribution and movements,” he explained.
Without immediate intervention to stem the loss of sea ice caused by the Arctic’s rapid warming, “two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be lost by midcentury. And all could be gone by century’s end,” Amstrup said.
“But the loss of the polar bear and its ecosystem is not really the issue. If we don’t change our greenhouse gas emissions path before midcentury, no one will be paying attention to polar bears,” he said.
He’s using this clarion call as a springboard to hope. And he’s got good reason to believe all is not lost. His research – published in a 2010 issue of Nature magazine – showed that with immediate action, there’s still time to turn things around.
A lifelong dream, realized
Born in Fargo, N.D., Amstrup says he knew by the age of five that he wanted to work with bears in the wild. The only bears he saw back then were on the pages of his father’s Field and Stream magazines and the TV show, “Wild Kingdom.”
Not until working on his master’s degree in U-Idaho’s Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit in the College of Natural Resources did he first realize his aspiration.
“I did research on black bears in central Idaho,” he said. “The applied nature of the program at the University of Idaho served to strengthen my beliefs that my research needed to be immediately applicable to management challenges rather than more basic or esoteric questions.”
Successive jobs with federal and state agencies sent him out to study mountain sheep, pronghorn antelope and sharp-tailed and sage grouse.
In 1980, he got his big break: He was asked to become the project leader for polar bear studies, with the
U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska.
“At the time, I was probably the only one in the Fish and Wildlife Service with ‘on the ground’ bear research experience, and the director of wildlife research nominated me for the post,” he said.
Amstrup led polar bear studies in Alaska until his retirement in 2010.
Advocating for a better future
Today, Amstrup wears a new mantle: polar bear advocate. He’s accepted a job as chief scientist for Polar Bears International, the world’s leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of the polar bear and its habitat through research, education and stewardship.
No longer in government service, he’s able to voice opinions and make wildlife management recommendations without restraints imposed by agency policies and politics, he said.
“My mission is to change our path on greenhouse gas emissions. And the Indianapolis Prize gives me a little bigger pulpit from which to preach,” he said. He’ll take his message to the masses in an upcoming series of speaking engagements arranged by the Indianapolis Zoo.
“If we allow ourselves to be distracted from the mission of reducing greenhouse gases … we simply will become the polar bear historians,” he said in an InsideClimate News interview.
Scientists “cannot predict the first summer the Arctic may be ice-free or the first year we will not be able to grow wheat on the Palouse,” Amstrup said. “But planetary physics require that without greenhouse gas mitigation, we will cross these and many other deleterious thresholds.”
Hand wringing won’t change a thing, he said. “This is a human-caused problem and humans can solve it. It’s important for people to know that. If the public believes there is nothing they can do, they will do nothing. My role now is to convince the public they can make a difference and inspire them to do it,” he told InsideClimate News.
“I’m trying to save the world, one polar bear at a time,” he said.
~ By Paula M. Davenport
