Do polar bears live in Antarctica? 285 players said yes

The US Fish and Wildlife Service lists five countries for the polar bear: Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States. All five reach into the Arctic. None of them is anywhere near Antarctica.

Almost every pin was at a pole

The players were not guessing at random. 1,009 of the 1,056 pins landed beyond 60 degrees, north or south. Only 47 went anywhere in between. For the other 93 animals in the game, one pin in 200 lands that far south.

So nearly everyone knew the polar bear lives in the cold. The hard part was which cold. Mixing up the two poles is an old classroom problem: Jessica Fries-Gaither's 2008 guide for Ohio State University lists it among the common misconceptions. I couldn't find anyone who had counted it.

A name settles it

If the question is only "which pole", a name that answers it should help. That was my hypothesis, and the game has the animals to test it.

It held. Antarctic krill, with the pole in its name, landed at the wrong pole 7% of the time. The Arctic fox, 13%. The polar bear's name fits both ends, and it got 27%.

Without a name, it's a coin toss

The crabeater seal has no clue in its name. It never leaves the pack ice around Antarctica, and the Australian Antarctic Division puts it at about 15 million animals, more than any other seal in the Southern Ocean. Of the players who put it at a pole, 116 chose Antarctica and 107 the Arctic.

The leopard seal and the Ross seal split the same way: across all three seals, 260 polar pins went south and 209 north.

Penguins pull everything south

One animal needs no name. Penguins pulled players south, even for species that never see ice. More than half the pins for the Humboldt penguin, which lives on the coasts of Peru and Chile, landed south of 60 degrees. For the little penguin of southern Australia and New Zealand it was 43%.

King penguins breed on islands between 45 and 55 degrees south, and 79% of their pins went further south still. Britannica notes that one penguin even lives on the Equator. That one has never made it into the picture.

What 1,056 pins can't tell us

These are players who chose a browser game, mostly in English. Not a representative sample. Pins at the very edge of a map are easy to drop, but the 93 other animals have the same edge and leave it alone.

Two poles, one picture

Next time a cartoon puts a polar bear next to a penguin, it is drawing both ends of the planet on one ice floe. More of what players get wrong: where people think animals live, and how small they make the Hindenburg.