Polar bears west of Canada’s Hudson Bay in the southern tip of the Arctic continue to die off in huge numbers, according to a new government study on the land carnivore. Female bears and cubs face the greatest difficulties.
Researchers surveyed the western Hudson Bay region by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, up from 842 in 2016, when the population was last surveyed.
“The actual decline is much greater than I would have expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta biology professor who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for nearly four decades. Derocher was not involved in the study.
Since the 1980s, the number of bears in the region has been reduced by almost 50%, according to the researchers’ findings. The ice, essential for their survival, is disappearing.
Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice, the surface of which shrinks in the summer with warmer temperatures and replenishes during the long winter. They use it to hunt, perching near holes in the thick ice to spot seals, their favorite food, as they surface for air. But because the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world due to climate change, sea ice is melting earlier than usual and it will take longer to freeze over by the end of the year.
This has left many polar bears living in the Arctic with less ice on which to live, hunt and breed.
Researchers say the concentration of young and female bear deaths 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 for long periods without enough food, and female bears suffer because they expend a lot of energy nursing and raising their cubs.
“It certainly raises feasibility issues,” Derocher said. “This is the reproductive engine of the population.”
The reproductive capacity of polar bears west of Hudson Bay will decrease, Atkinson explained, “because there are simply fewer young bears that will survive to become adults.”
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