Canada

Video of Starving Polar Bear ‘Rips Your Heart Out of Your Chest’

By MATT STEVENS

The photographer Paul Nicklen said he wanted to show people what a starving polar bear really looked like. Sealegacy/Caters News

As his boat came around a corner last August, Paul Nicklen spotted what at first looked like a white blanket draped over a rock. And although he kept his distance, it soon became clear the blanket was not actually a blanket at all; it was a polar bear — one Mr. Nicklen thought was surely dead.

The polar bear, though, was not dead — at least not yet. And when it managed to stand up, Mr. Nicklen, a visual storyteller, snapped a photo. When he published it on Instagram, the image garnered such a strong response that he knew he needed to return with other members of his conservation organization and the proper filming equipment. Mr. Nicklen, 49, wanted to show people what a starving polar bear really looked like — he wanted to make a scientific data point something real.

So he and a small group came back to the spot in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago about two days later. Then they watched: as the polar bear rummaged through a rusted trash can, as it nibbled at an old snowmobile seat, as its eyes turned downcast, its spirit defeated.

“It rips your heart out of your chest,” Mr. Nicklen said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As soon as he did a slow stand on his feet, everybody on the team just started crying.”

Last week, Mr. Nicklen, his group SeaLegacy and National Geographic published photos and videos from the encounter. They showed the world the polar bear, stranded on iceless land, its white coat dirtied, its body emaciated, its movements labored.

And when the world saw, millions recoiled in heartbroken horror.

“Inexcusable,” wrote one commenter on Instagram.

“So sad,” said many more.

“What,” several asked, “can we do?”

Photo by @CristinaMittermeier // This is what a starving polar bear looks like. Weak muscles, atrophied by extended starvation could barely hold him up. Our @Sea_Legacy team watched as he painfully staggered towards the abandoned fishing camp from which we were observing@and found some trash to eat—a piece of foam from the seat of a snowmobile, as we later found out. People have asked why we couldn’t help it, why we didn’t feed it. In addition to being illegal to feed wildlife, polar bears like this one need several hundred pounds of meat to survive. They primarily eat seals and they struggle when they are stranded for long periods of time on land, without a sea ice platform from which to hunt. We didn’t have a weapon and we didn’t have any food for it. There literally was nothing we could do for him as we were hundreds of miles from the nearest Inuit community. What could we have done? What we did do was push through our tears knowing that this footage was going to help connect a global audience to the biggest issue facing us as a species today. It is true that we don’t know what caused this animal to starve but we are certain that unless we curb carbon emissions, sea ice will continue to disappear and many more bears will starve. With these images, we want to wake the world up to the imminence of climate change and to how it will affect wildlife and people for decades to come. For solutions on how each and everyone can make a positive impact on this planet #follow me at @CristinaMittermeier or go to @Sea_Legacy. #nature #naturelovers #bethechange #FaceofClimateChange #StopFossilFuels #NoArcticDrilling #TurningtheTide with @SeaLegacy. With @PaulNicklen and our entire team. Thank you @natgeo for helping us try and reach the world.

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Experts and environmentalists say the broad answer — however controversial and nuanced it may be — is to reduce the present levels of global greenhouse gas emissions in order to curb global warming. In January, federal wildlife officials issued a report that called climate change the biggest threat to the survival of the polar bear.

Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals. As the planet warms, that ice cover melts earlier and earlier, limiting the amount of time polar bears have to hunt and build up their fat reserves before moving to land. As a result, they can end up skinny and in poor physical health by the end of long ice-free summers.

Biologists agree that as ice cover continues to decrease, there will be a significant drop in the polar bear population, which according to federal wildlife officials stands at about 26,000 globally. A 2015 assessment projected a reduction of over 30 percent in the number of polar bears by 2050.

“Polar bears are built for a feast-or-famine type of eating,” said Elisabeth Kruger, an arctic wildlife program officer with the World Wildlife Fund. “But when that period of fasting gets too long, it can put them on the brink.”

Polar bears have been labeled threatened under the Endangered Species Act act since 2008. They are among the largest members of the bear species and prey heavily on seals.

All of which makes the viral images of a fur-and-bones polar bear particularly striking. The bear Mr. Nicklen and his team documented was stuck on land, its muscles atrophied by continuing starvation, and apparently on the edge of death.

One would have to do “a lot of specific investigating” to determine the cause of suffering for a particular polar bear, Ms. Kruger said, but what is captured in Mr. Nicklen’s photo “is one of the ways polar bears die.”

Most of the feedback Mr. Nicklen has received on social media appears positive, if twined with sadness. (The viral video of the polar bear, he noted, has been slowed from normal speed.) But he has also received blowback from some who have complained he did not do enough to help.

“People assume you’re just coldhearted,” he said. “Of course we’re upset.” But feeding the polar bear would not only prolong its misery, he said, it would have been illegal. And “for me to take a gun up to that polar bear and kill it, now you’re looking at jail.”

This is not the first time a downtrodden polar bear has captured the hearts of humans. After all, they are “incredibly charismatic,” Ms. Kruger said, and “big, white, fluffy creatures.”

Last year, a polar bear named Pizza garnered the support of millions of people worldwide when animal welfare advocates began a campaign to move “the world’s saddest polar bear,” as he was known, from a mall in southern China, where the bear lived in a glass enclosure.

Mr. Nicklen said the polar bear he and his team found was never given a cute human name. But he said everyone on the team called it by the same phrase: “The dying polar bear.”