'Worlds saddest polar bear' exhibited in Chinese shopping centre

Pipette8 · Jul 20, 2016

I absolutely, unequivocally despise the Asian (especially Chinese) attitude towards God's creatures. If they are not killing elephants for their ivory tusks, they are starving tigers to harvest their bones to make an aphrodisiac, skinning dogs alive, or they are imprisoning polar bears in cages in shopping malls.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/20/worlds-saddest-polar-bear-chinese-shopping-centre

More than 285,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of an aquarium in southern China that is home to an animal dubbed the worlds saddest polar bear.

The lethargic bear, whose name is Pizza, is on show at an ocean theme park located inside the Grandview shopping centre in the city of Guangzhou.

The aquarium made international headlines after its opening in early January with one Hong Kong-based animal rights charity denouncing it as a horrifying animal prison.

However, amid outrage over the dismal conditions in which the animals were being forced to live, as tourists posed for selfies beside them, members of the Hong Kong-based charity Animals Asia were invited to visit the aquarium in April.

[video=youtube;tpGFjYFHy2A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpGFjYFHy2A[/video]The activist group said the theme parks management had been genuinely shocked by the international outcry and had sought advice on how to improve conditions.

Animals Asia said there was no indication the aquarium would be closed or its animals, which also include arctic wolves, beluga whales and walrus calves, rehoused.

However, writing last week, Dave Neale, the groups animal welfare director, said the parks directors had promised a better life for its animals as a result of pressure.

Neale said engagement had previously led to positive changes at a zoo in Hanoi where the charity convinced zoo keepers to unchain elephants, end animal circuses and provide better living conditions for bears and tigers.

waltky · Oct 2, 2016

Polar bears face extinction as arctic ice melts beyond normal...

Polar bear population endangered as artic ice melts beyond normal
Oct 02, 2016 - Arctic is melting rapidly and polar bears are victims of the consequences of Climate Change

The Cryosophere released their journals that ice melt continuously all over artic region. "These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed. Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months," said co-author Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center. Ecowatch reported. Laidre explained that the ice platform is where the polar bears hunt for survival. They get nutrients on eating seals. But as the platform melts, they are not able to hunt because polar bears do not know how to swim.

Polar bears are the victim of the consequences of the Climate Change.

Hence, the scarcity of food is high and bears do no know how to conserve their energy to survive the summer season. Together with Harry Stern, principal mathematician at the PSC, they used 35 years satellite to observed and studies the sea ice in the Artic. They computed the dates when the sea ice melts in Artic spring and advance in autumn including during summer. "We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," said Laidre further explains

As reported by nature.com, United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia adopted a 10-year circumpolar action on polar bear conservation last 2015. According to Dag Vongraven of the Norwegian Polar Research Institute in Tromsø, they plan to use common measurements for habitat change and put all the efforts for the conservation. The Artic lost faster on the first ten days of September. The ice platform lost 34,100 square kilometers compared to 1981-2010 long-term average of 21,000 square kilometers. The impact two cyclones last August behind the ice loss in Chukchi Sea.

http://www.hngn.com/articles/209189/20161002/ice-platform-melting-polar-bears-climate-change.htm
Click to expand...

waltky · Dec 12, 2016

Arctic sea ice melt causin' Polar bear numbers to decline one-third...

Polar bear numbers seen declining a third from Arctic sea ice melt
Mon Dec 12, 2016 | Rising temperatures that melt sea ice in the Arctic will probably reduce the polar bear population by a third over the next few decades, and the same warming trend is likely to worsen the decline of wild reindeer, scientists said on Monday.

The new findings by university and government researchers were presented as part of a panel discussion about climate impacts on wildlife during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The presentation was streamed live on the internet. The polar bear research is drawn from new satellite data documenting a loss of Arctic sea ice - the animal's chief habitat - from 1979 to 2015, and forming the basis of projections in further declines of both ice and bears over the coming decades. Polar bears currently number about 26,000, but their population is expected to diminish by some 8,600 animals over the next 35 to 40 years, the scientists said. At the time polar bears were declared a threatened species in 2008, one study predicted they could vanish from two-thirds of their native range by mid-century.

A polar bear sow and two cubs are seen on the Beaufort Sea coast within the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in this undated handout photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska Image Library

The latest data better quantifies such an outcome. "There is the potential for a large reduction in the global population of polar bears over the next three generations if the sea ice loss continues at the rate we've seen it," said Kristin Laidre, a marine mammal ecologist at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center. Polar bears, standing as tall as 11 feet (3.35 meters) and weighing up to 1,400 pounds (635 kg), use floating sea ice as platforms for everything from mating and rearing their young to hunting their preferred prey of ringed seals. The study was led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Eric Regehr, who told Reuters habitat loss was unequivocal but that effects have varied among the world's 19 sub-populations of polar bears, whose range lies mainly within the Arctic Circle. He pointed to a region north of Alaska where the number has dropped sharply amid significant sea ice losses.

Another population west of Alaska appears to have experienced less impact, but that area may sustain larger, healthier populations of seals and other polar bear prey, Regehr said. A warmer climate also is thought to be a primary culprit in the rapid decline of wild reindeer and their close cousins, caribou, Andrey Petrov, head of the Arctic Center at the University of Northern Iowa, said at Monday's symposium. Petrov's study of wild reindeer in Taimyr in northern Russia shows that herd's population has fallen to about 600,000 animals, from 1 million in 2000. The Taimyr population, accounting for about 24 percent of all wild reindeer, is challenged by such factors as loss of young because of migration patterns hampered by a warming climate.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-climate-arctic-idUSKBN14205I
Click to expand...

jackdog · Dec 13, 2016

odd thing is we have had several inter-glacial periods during the last 1.5 million years when the arctic was completely ice free and polar bears did just fine

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