Canadian polar bears near ‘bear capital’ dying at fast rate
Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay are continuing to die in high numbers, a new government survey found. Females and bear cubs are having an especially hard time.
Researchers surveyed Western Hudson Bay — known as ‘the Polar Bear Capital of the World,’ — by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, compared to the 842 in 2016.
ADVERTISING
“The actual decline is a lot larger than I would have expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for nearly four decades.
Since the 1980s, the number of bears in the region has fallen by nearly 50%. The ice essential to their survival is disappearing.
Polar bears rely on arctic sea ice that shrinks in the summer with warmer temperatures and forms again in winter. They use it to hunt for seals, their favorite food. But as the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world due to climate change, sea ice is cracking earlier in the year and taking longer to freeze in the fall.
That has left polar bears that live across the Arctic with less ice to live, hunt and reproduce on.
