The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [71]
Wildlife is also on the move. From my travels and interviews the appearance of “southern” creatures in northern places was a prevailing theme. I heard repeatedly about raccoons, white-tailed deer, beavers, and even a mountain lion spotted in places they’d never been seen before. My uncle, a longtime outdoorsman in northern New York State, noticed gray squirrels and opossums moving in, along with some crazy disruptions to the spring harvest of maple syrup. The Mountain Pine Beetle, normally kept in check by winter-kill, is now devastating Canadian forests. Other biological examples published in the scientific literature include the common buzzard Buteo buteo wintering near Moscow, nearly a thousand kilometers north of normal; a northward shift in Japan’s Greater White-fronted Goose, Anser albifrons; and Sweden’s Brown Hare, Lepus europaeus, infiltrating the territory of (and possibly hybridizing with) Lepus timidus, the Mountain Hare. Red foxes are displacing Arctic foxes. Beavers are pushing north, and model projections suggest they will also become denser inside their current range.300
By midcentury Ixodes scapularis—the Lyme-disease-carrying tick—is projected to expand northward from its current toehold in southern Ontario to much of Canada. By century’s end the smallmouth bass, today found only near the U.S. border, is projected to live all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In the North Sea—one of the world’s most productive fisheries—nearly two-thirds of all fish species have either shifted north in latitude or sunk down to cooler water depths. Even lowly plankton is on the move: In the past forty years Atlantic warm-water species have pushed northward a staggering ten degrees of latitude—almost seven hundred miles—supplanting cold-water species that are in turn retreating north.
The Displaced
The 2007 sea-ice contraction triggered a new wave of public consternation about the future of polar bears, including an environmentalist push in the United States to classify them under the Endangered Species Act. This gesture, ultimately rebuffed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, was largely symbolic (far more polar bears live offshore of Canada, Russia, and Greenland than Alaska, and these countries are certainly not beholden to the U.S. Endangered Species Act), but the concern for these magnificent animals is valid. They exist naturally only in the Arctic301 and are uniquely adapted to live out their lives roaming on top of a frozen ocean. Their home is on the floating sea ice, hunting ringed seals, napping, and occasionally cavorting or mating with one another. Some females go onto land to give birth, but they otherwise spend as much time as possible out on the ice. Unlike other bears they do not hibernate through the winter. The lean time for polar bears is in summer, when the ice disintegrates and retreats. Forced ashore, they mostly fast and wait until it returns.
There is growing evidence that the waiting and fasting periods are getting longer, leading to skinny bears, strange behavior (like wandering into towns), and even cannibalism. In 2004 biologists confirmed three occurrences of polar bears deliberately hunting and eating each other. In one case a large male bear pounded its forepaws through the den roof of a female, savagely bit into her head and neck, then dragged her off in a trail of blood to be devoured. Her cubs were buried and suffocated in the rubble. Such behavior had never been seen before during the scientists’ thirty-four years of research in the area.302
The problem is that the bears’ favorite prey, ringed seals,