The classical variational analysis of curvature energy functionals, acting on spaces of curves of a Riemannian manifold, is extremely complicated, and the procedure usually can not be completely developed under such a degree of generality. Sometimes this difficulty may be overcome by focusing on specific actions in real space forms. In this note, we restrict ourselves to quadratic Lagrangian energies acting on the space of closed curves of the 2-sphere. We solve the Euler–Lagrange equation and show that there exists a two-parameter family of closed critical curves. We also discuss the stability of the circular critical points. Since, even for this class of energies, the complete variational analysis is quite involved, we use instead a numerical approach to provide a useful method of visualization of relevant aspects concerning uniqueness, stability and explicit representation of the closed critical curves.
