Nanook of the south...

A record was broken today that I think will get some national and international attention. OK, what is one of the most important issues facing modern civilization? Global Warming/Climate Change. And, what is one of icons of this issue? The Polar Bear. So, what happened today? A Polar Bear wandered into Fort Yukon, an Athabaskan village in Interior Alaska that's 250 miles from the coast. That's as far inland as a polar bear has ever been documented in the state. That's very interesting. What happened to it? Well, a local gunned it down with an assault rifle. Unfortunately, that act is going to get a lot of attention and hubub, and while that may not have been what I'd personally like to have seen happen, I think it may distract from the far more interesting thing. What the heck was a "marine mammal" doing in the middle of the state?

Last fall, while way up on the Dalton Highway for a caribou hunt, a friend, who had recently moved to Interior from Southeast, asked a reasonable question. "Do polar bears ever come this far south?" With the kind of foolishly assured bravado that even 10 years of science training still hasn't purged me of (but should), I said "Nah... Prudhoe and Deadhorse area, sure, but not this far down into the foothills of the Brooks range..." Never say never. We were in the Happy Valley Area, a good 80 miles from the oil complexes on the coast where I assumed polar bears were invisibly tethered to there sea-ice habitat. A few short weeks later I found myself in a discussion with a hunter. Now I can't remember how it came up, but he volunteered that yea, actually about 5 years ago he and his partners came across a polar bear feeding off a caribou carcass just off the Haul Road, literally, in the Toolik Lake area, a good 125 miles south of the coast. Wow, OK, I guess I was wrong, oops, my bad. But was such southern meandering common then? No, not at all. Apparently, until today, that instance was the farthest inland documented polar bear in Alaska. That 2002 lost bear was a bit luckier than today's, as assault rifles are rather uncommon weapons in the Dalton Highway hunting corridor... it's surmised, I think, that the bear mosied on back to the ocean...

OK, so let's be blunt. Are there links between Global Warming and a polar bear in Fort Yukon? Well on a number of grounds I object to the question being raised at all... but let me be circuitous in giving an answer to my own blunt question. First, not all the results are in. Apparently there's a minsicule chance the bear is a polar/grizzly hybrid. A hunter in April 2006 shot a polar bear with odd brownish spots... hmm... couple tests later... and the DNA don't lie, momma and papa, well, shouldn't have got along as well as they apparently did... But in fact, hybrids do occur (and in fact are reportedly fertile) and perhaps have enough anatomical, physiological, and behavioral traits that could sometimes allow them to do well in grizzly country... i.e. terra firma. This fact, hybridization potential brings up two related issues, or rather two related views... one view back on polar bear history, one forward on polar bear future. Basically this is a fascinating evolutionary tale with some policy implications I think.

The oldest known fossil of a polar bear is only 100,000 years. I say only, even though that's a long time. I mean, start counting to 100,000 and tell me how far you get. That's a lot of years. But in evolutionary and geologic time, not so much. To put it in perspective, the dozen or so bear species on earth today shared a common ancestor that branched off from other carnivores 38 million years ago or so... by that clock, the polar is a brand new bear. But it might not even REALLY be a new bear. The folks at Alaska Department of Fish and Game who are going to verify whether or not this is a hybrid bear, are likely going to look at it's teeth, particularly the molars, and in a couple days there'll probably be some DNA results. A close look at that DNA, whether mom and pop were the same species or not, holds a fascinating tale. Recently, researchers, in comparing DNA from polar bears to that of brown/grizzly bears from various populations, uncovered a really fascinating story. Some brown bears are more closely related to all polar bears than they are to other brown bears. Think about it. Get it? By a lot of scientists' definition, polar bears can't even be considered their own species. They're just a really unique sub-species of brown bear. In fact, just 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, from the fossil evidence, those teeth that are today diagnostic, weren't all that distinctive... that's how rapidly the polar bear has adapted to it's sea-ice habitat and specialized diet... it's a very different way of life, and selection has resulted in some very fast evolution to form earth's largest living carnivore and current icon of change in the north. In a way, it's rather fitting. Change, at this moment in time, is happening at potentially unprecedented rates in the North. And, low and behold, our chosen icon is this crazy species who itself shape-shifted in the blink of a geologic eye into our beloved Nanook...

OK, finally... looking forward and the policy implications... Clearly, no matter how quickly the polar bear evolved, or how genetically distinct it is, there is nothing else like it. I say it is worth treasuring and fighting to save at whatever the cost. If we can't muster the will to care unconditionally about the polar bear, do we have any hope for caring at all, for saving anything? I can certainly see a couple of the above mentioned facts, wielded in the wrong hands, being used in a case against the polar bear. I'm going to play devil's advocate, and leave the last word with the devil. There are certainly rebuttals, and rebuffs to those rebuts, but I'll leave it open... "If it's not even really a real species, why should it be considered for listing as a Threatened Species?" (I actually don't know about this, perhaps sub-species can be...). And, relevant to today's event... "If a polar bear can make it down into Interior Alaska and remain healthy [untill gunned down with an AR-15], doesn't that show potential that they could adapt well to a world without summer sea ice? I mean, they evolved so quickly in the past, perhaps they'll just adapt to the new regime... " What do you think?