Scientists “quite surprised” to find one polar bear population thriving: “A fat bear is a healthy bear”

Scientists have reported some rare good news from the Arctic. As the climate changes and the ice melts, in one region at least, polar bears are thriving — finding new ways to survive, and even packing on the pounds.

“A fat bear is a healthy bear,” Jon Aars, a senior scientist with the Norwegian Polar Institute, told CBS News on Thursday. 

He’s been tracking polar bears on the remote, arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard for more than 20 years. He led a team of researchers who meticulously tracked the weight and size of nearly 800 bears between 1992 and 2019.

They found the polar giants to be in good shape, able to survive and to continue raising new cubs.

“I was quite surprised,” Aars admitted, “because we have lost so much sea ice since I started.”

For years scientists have raised the alarm that shrinking sea ice cover could put polar bears at risk, as they use the ice as a platform from which to hunt for seals. 

“Some of us would predict that they should be in trouble already,” Aars said. 

But what his team has found suggests the bears are adapting to smaller ice patches, and it may even be helping them hunt more efficiently as their prey, which also relies on the ice, is concentrated in smaller areas.

“I think what this shows is they need less sea ice than we thought,” Aars told CBS News.

His team’s research also found that the melting ice is pushing polar bears to get creative on land — where they’re increasingly feasting on other prey, such as reindeer and walruses.

“Some of them would be on land as much as 90% of the time now, which is a lot,” he said.

While thriving bears is undeniably good news, Aars stressed that more research is needed to understand how polar bears in other parts of the Arctic are adapting to a warming climate. And he cautioned that his team’s research does not attempt to predict how the animals will handle the continuing warming of the Arctic. 

“Bears are still able to cope with the situation as it is today,” he said. “The bad news is that predictions [are that] we’re going to lose sea ice fast in Svalbard.”

Aars and many other scientists remain concerned, in other words, that the gains by the Svalbard bears will be temporary, and could be reversed.