Polar Bears: The Natural History of a Threatened Species

摘要

It has been 24 yr since Ian Stirling published his ?rst book about polar bears, Ursus maritimus (Stirling 1988). He was then among the more experienced polar bear researchers, and had initiated work on polar bears in western Hudson Bay, in what has become the longest running and most extensive data series on polar bears, about four decades of annual capture data. I read it when I started working with polar bears a decade ago, and found it to be a very useful introduction to the ?eld, well written in an accessible language. It also had many beautiful photographs by Dan Guravich. I was very curious when I got my hands on Ian Stirling’s new book, “Polar Bears: The Natural History of a Threatened Species.” How much would be merely duplication of his earlier book, and how much would be new? The answer is that his latest book is not merely a new version of the former, but very different and even more comprehensive. The ?rst part of this book deals with distribution and abundance, the evolutionary history and the historical and more current interactions between the polar bears and humans. Further, he describes how polar bears are studied, with a lot of interesting examples of speci?c projects and the ?ndings mostly from the last four decades. The book covers all major ?elds of what we know about polar bear biology, including basic physiology, behavior, and demography. It does so both in breadth and depth, and thus is of interest both for those that need to review some general facts as well as for people that already have a good basic knowledge about the species. The concluding chapters deal in detail with conservation issues, describing both minor and major threats, and how these have changed in importance over time.