Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Why is resilience low if some subpopulations look stable?
IUCN VU and the 2008 ESA listing rest on ice-season length. A few stable stocks do not cancel a circumpolar ice forecast. High resilience in this atlas means secure (koi, many owls), not famous.
What did the 2008 US listing change?
It treated greenhouse gases as a listed-species threat. Courts later limited how far that could reach power plants; the biological finding stayed.
Is Churchill typical?
Western Hudson Bay is an early-ice-loss stock and a tourist town. It is a visible subpopulation, not the whole Arctic.
Who was Knut?
A hand-reared Berlin cub (2006-2011) whose fame and death made zoo ethics a tabloid. He is culture, not a sea-ice time series.
Do polar bears eat only seals?
Seals (especially ringed) are the fat that pays. Bird eggs, carrion and land food appear more in long ice-free summers -- a budget problem, not a new niche that replaces ice.
What is Nanook of the North to this file?
The 1922 film staged Inuit life for a southern camera. It is a portrayal, not an ethnography of nanuq knowledge.
IUCN: Vulnerable
Anatomy overlay
Numbered teaching hotspots on the species still — not a clinical diagnosis.
- 1 Primary weapon or tool — The bill, teeth, trunk, pouch or talon that field guides name first -- and that trade or c
- 2 Energy store — Fat, cache, crop or bamboo hours that decide whether a season closes.
- 3 Natal or breeding site — A redd, eyrie, den, anemone or ice lair -- often a single-point risk (Izumi, Natron, Gir).
- 4 Sensory organ — Smell through ice and a patience that looks like stillness. Vision is secondary to a hole
- 5 Human interface — Hunt, tourism, film or quota -- the surface where polar bear biology meets English-languag
Every polar bear is a stack of tissues that must agree under season, prey and human pressure.
Meters below repeat the six atlas scores as gauges; they are relative marks, not laboratory certificates.
Systems
Support and integument
A long-skulled ursid with huge forepaws, black skin under hollow guard hairs, and a gut built for seal fat. It is a marine mammal in habit, a bear in clade.
Feeding apparatus
Still-hunt at seal holes and break-in on birth lairs. Fat, not lean meat, pays the ice year. Onshore summers are a deficit for many stocks. The feeding kit sets the ecological-role score relative to the other 23 types.
Respiration and circulation
Gas exchange and blood flow are tuned to the polar bear energy budget -- dive, hover, sprint or bulk browse -- not to a generic vertebrate template.
Senses and neural control
Smell through ice and a patience that looks like stillness. Vision is secondary to a hole in the ice.
Reproduction and ontogeny
Replacement rate is the hidden resilience number. Ice-season length. A stable stock in one basin does not retire a VU card written on a melt curve.
Thermoregulation and salt/water
Climate and osmoregulation bound where a polar bear can close its daily budget. Field sites in the English-speaking world still measure that envelope first.
Relative meters
Hotspots
Primary weapon or tool
The bill, teeth, trunk, pouch or talon that field guides name first -- and that trade or conflict usually targets.
Energy store
Fat, cache, crop or bamboo hours that decide whether a season closes.
Natal or breeding site
A redd, eyrie, den, anemone or ice lair -- often a single-point risk (Izumi, Natron, Gir).
Sensory organ
Smell through ice and a patience that looks like stillness. Vision is secondary to a hole in the ice.
Human interface
Hunt, tourism, film or quota -- the surface where polar bear biology meets English-language law.
Tissues & materials
Keratin and integument
Feathers, fur, baleen or skin plates -- tissues, not metals. Moult and wear are the maintenance cycle.
Bone and cartilage
Load paths for stoop, lunge, knuckle-walk or hover. Marrow and pneumatic bone differ by family.
Muscle and tendon
The expensive tissue that speed and intelligence scores only hint at.
Fat, oil and glycogen
Stores that migration, fast and lactation spend. A market for those stores (oil, ivory, fin) is a historical threat.
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