6 Species That Depend on the Alaskan Arctic to Survive

Picture ten thousand walrus crowded onto a single beach — massive animals, some weighing over a ton, pressed together so tightly that a single loud noise can trigger a stampede. This is what happens when sea ice disappears. The Pacific walrus evolved to rest on ice floes in the Bering and Chukchi Seas while diving to the ocean floor for clams and other bivalves. As that ice retreats, walrus are forced ashore and far from their food, burning precious calories on longer swims and exposing calves to dangers the species never adapted to face. As the Smithsonian Ocean Portal documents, these mass haul-out events — unheard of in living memory — are now a recurring feature of Alaska’s Arctic coast. Protecting intact nearshore habitat where walrus haul out, rest, and feed is one of the most direct investments we can make in this species’ future. 

Polar bears are built for ice — it is the hunting platform they depend on to reach the ringed seals that make up nearly their entire diet. As Arctic sea ice shrinks at an average of 15.7 percent per decade, according to the World Wildlife Fund, bears are going hungry, and females are struggling to build the fat reserves they need to successfully den and raise cubs. In Alaska’s Southern Beaufort Sea, the population has already fallen to roughly 618 bears, according to Polar Bears International — about half of what it was in the 1980s. What land conservation can do for polar bears is protect the undisturbed coastal and tundra habitat where females den and where bears retreat between hunting seasons — the terrestrial foundation that gives this species its best chance of weathering what’s ahead. 

Every spring, one of the great wildlife spectacles remaining on Earth unfolds across Alaska’s Arctic: hundreds of thousands of caribou moving north across open tundra, following routes their ancestors have traveled for thousands of years. But those herds are shrinking. According to NOAA’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, caribou populations across the Arctic tundra have fallen 65 percent over the past few decades. Alaska’s Western Arctic Herd — once the largest in the state — has dropped from 490,000 animals in 2003 to just 152,000 as of 2023. A warming climate is replacing the lichen and open tundra caribou depend on with dense shrubs and young trees, while roads and industrial infrastructure carve up the migration corridors these animals have no other way around. Keeping Alaska’s Arctic landscape intact is one of the most powerful things we can do for caribou right now. 

The Arctic char holds a distinction no other fish can claim: it is the northernmost freshwater species in the world, living in cold, remote lakes and rivers that most people will never see and few pressures have yet reached. In Alaska, that remoteness is the only thing standing between this species and serious trouble. Warming temperatures are pushing competing fish species northward into char territory, raising mercury levels in Arctic freshwaters, and shrinking the cold, oxygen-rich habitat char need to survive. This species has no warmer-water alternative, no southern backup range. Permanently protecting the remote lakes, rivers, and watersheds where Arctic char live — before development pressure reaches them — is how we ensure this species still has somewhere to go. 

They arrive every spring by the millions — dunlin, semipalmated sandpipers, American golden-plovers — having flown thousands of miles from wintering grounds in South America, the Gulf Coast, and across the Pacific. They come because Alaska’s Arctic tundra offers something no other place can: an explosion of insects and long summer days that give them exactly what they need to nest, raise chicks, and fuel the next generation. But according to research published in Global Change Biology, 66 to 83 percent of Arctic specialist shorebird species could lose the majority of their suitable breeding area by 2070, with the steepest losses projected in western Alaska. These birds belong to the whole hemisphere — but they can only reproduce here. Protecting Alaska’s tundra wetlands protects birds that winter as far away as Patagonia and the Pacific Islands, a conservation investment with returns that span continents. 

The bearded seal gets its name from the remarkable white whiskers on its face, which are so sensitive they can detect a clam buried in the ocean floor in near-total darkness. In Alaska’s Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas, bearded seals are one of four ice-dependent species that Alaska Native communities have relied on for food, fuel, and materials for generations. According to NOAA Fisheries, the shallow shelf of the Bering and Chukchi Seas is the largest continuous bearded seal habitat in the world — and it is changing fast. In October 2025, the IUCN moved the bearded seal from Least Concern to Near Threatened, citing sea ice loss occurring four times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Protecting the intact coastal landscapes of Alaska’s Bering and Chukchi Seas from industrial disturbance gives bearded seals the stability they need as their frozen world continues to shrink. 

Habitat Protection is the Last Line of Defense 

Each of these species evolved to thrive in a specific place under specific conditions. When those conditions change faster than they can adapt, populations falter. But intact land and habitat protection still matter — the populations holding on are often the ones with the most intact habitat beneath them. 

That is the work The Conservation Fund does in the Alaskan Arctic. Permanent land protection, secured before the window closes, in partnership with the Alaska Native communities who have been the Arctic’s original stewards for thousands of years. The Arctic is irreplaceable. So are the animals that call it home.