Polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay — on the southern edge of the Arctic — continue to die in large numbers, a new government probe into the land predator has found. Females and bear cubs have a particularly difficult time.
Researchers surveyed western Hudson Bay — home of Churchill, the city dubbed the “polar bear capital of the world” — from the air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, compared to 842 in 2016 when they were last examined.
“The actual decline is much larger than I expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied polar bears in Hudson Bay for nearly four decades. Derocher was not involved in the study.
Since the 1980s, bear numbers in the region have declined by nearly 50%, the authors noted. The ice essential to their survival is disappearing.
Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice — frozen seawater — that shrinks in summer with warmer temperatures and forms again in the long winter. They use it to hunt, perching near holes in the thick ice to spot seals, their favorite food, emerging for air. However, because the Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world due to climate change, sea ice is breaking earlier in the year and taking longer to freeze in the fall.
As a result, many polar bears living throughout the Arctic have less ice on which to live, hunt and breed.
Polar bears are not only important predators in the Arctic. For years before climate change began to affect people around the world, they were also the most recognizable face of climate change.
Researchers said the concentration of deaths among young bears and females in western Hudson Bay is alarming.
“These are the types of bears that we always predicted would be affected by changes in the environment,” said Stephen Atkinson, the lead author, who has studied polar bears for more than 30 years.
Young bears need energy to grow and cannot survive long without enough food, and female bears struggle because they expend so much energy nurturing and raising their offspring.
“It certainly raises questions about continued viability,” Derocher said. “This is the reproductive engine of the population.”
The reproductive capacity of polar bears in western Hudson Bay will decline, Atkinson said, “because there are simply fewer young bears surviving and growing to adulthood.”
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