Will These Be the Last Polar Bears on Earth?

The last surviving member of a species—the individual whose death brings extinction—is called an endling. Those individuals can sometimes be identified, even named. Many more of them live and die unseen. For example, archaeological evidence shows that the woolly mammoth endling lived about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, 87 miles off the coast of Siberia. Mammoths survived there for millennia after the rest of their kind were wiped out by changing climate and human hunters. But eventually, through some combination of factors, including extreme weather events and harmful mutations acquired through heavy inbreeding, they also perished. I thought about them as I listened to Kristin Laidre talking about polar bears.

Laidre, who is an ecologist at the University