Pre-industrial emblem
42Heraldry, materia medica or first-fish law met the polar bear before film.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed54
Intelligence73
Range55
Resilience21
Cultural impact67
Ecological role67
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Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
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
Polar bear culture is local: the same silhouette is a licence in one country and a logo in another.
Status bars are editorial -- they track how loudly this type spoke in English-language media and law, not a best-species score.
Status through time
Industrial take
66Canneries, ivory, longlines or shikar scaled the take.
Cinema and logo
59A film, book or NGO mark often outran the field paper.
Statute and listing
75ESA, CITES, IWC or national parks made the type a legal object.
Live-cam and tourism
49Streams, jeeps and auctions are the present tense of attention.
Portrayals
Flaherty film1922
Nanook as a staged north.
Buggy postcard1980s-
Churchill as a species address.
Knut tabloids2006-11
A cub as a European soap.
ESA brief2008
Ice as habitat in a statute.
Coke ads1990s-
Cultural impact without a census.
USGS graph2010s
A model as a public exhibit.
Rituals
Buggy seasons
Churchill times a town to a migration.
Den-cam winters
PBI cameras treat a birth as a livestream.
Range-state meetings
The 1973 agreement still convenes a hunt-and-ice table.
Sayings
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