Researchers have found an alarming mortality rate among polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay, an area that includes a city called “the polar bear capital of the world.”
Once-populous predators are dying off the southern edge of the Arctic, and in large numbers, according to a new government survey.
Female bears and cubs have an especially difficult time surviving, the study found.
Polar bear mother (Ursus maritimus) with cubs on subarctic ice in Wager Bay, near Hudson Bay, Churchill area, Manitoba, northern Canada
(fake images)
The new survey found that only 618 polar bears remained in the area as of 2021, a drop from the 842 found in the same area in 2016, when the area was last surveyed.
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“The actual decline is much larger than I expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta.
Although Derocher has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for nearly 40 years, he was not involved in the study.
The decline has persisted for decades, showing that since the 1980s the number of bears in the region has dropped by nearly 50%, the researchers found.
A polar bear swims to catch a beluga whale along the Hudson Bay shoreline near Churchill on August 9, 2022.
(OLIVIER MORIN/AFP via Getty Images)
The decline shares a correlation with the disappearance of ice essential to their survival, they said.
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Polar bears survive on Arctic sea ice, frozen ocean water, which they use to swim and hunt for food. The ice shrinks seasonally in the summer as warmer temperatures become more common, and it reforms during the colder winter months.
Stephen Atkinson, the lead author of the study who has studied polar bears for more than 30 years, said this sea ice is melting earlier in the year and takes longer to freeze, due to the generally warmer temperatures brought on by the change. climate.
“Those are the types of bears that we’ve always predicted would be affected by changes in the environment,” Atkinson said.
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A male polar bear walks along the shoreline of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba on August 23, 2010. Polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay, at the southern tip of the Arctic, they continue to die in large numbers, according to a new government survey. Posted Thursday December 22, 2022, found.
(Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)
“It certainly raises issues about ongoing feasibility,” Derocher said. “That is the reproductive engine of the population.”
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Less ice and fewer polar bears result in fewer opportunities for the bears to mate, further affecting their decline, Atkinson said, “because there are simply fewer young bears surviving to become adults.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
