Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay are persevering with to die in excessive numbers, a survey has discovered.
Analysis exhibits that females and bear cubs are having an particularly onerous time within the bay on the southern fringe of the Arctic.
Western Hudson Bay – house to Churchill, the city generally known as “the Polar Bear Capital of the World” – was surveyed by air in 2021, with scientists estimating there have been 618 bears, in comparison with the 842 in 2016, when a rely was final carried out.
“The precise decline is lots bigger than I’d have anticipated,” stated Andrew Derocher, a biology professor on the College of Alberta who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for practically 4 many years.
For the reason that 1980s, the variety of bears within the area has fallen by practically 50 p.c, the authors discovered. The ice important to their survival is disappearing.
Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice – frozen ocean water – that shrinks in the summertime with hotter temperatures earlier than forming once more within the lengthy winter.
The carnivores use it to hunt, perching close to holes within the thick ice to identify seals, their favourite meals, arising for air.
However because the Arctic has warmed twice as quick as the remainder of the world due to local weather change, sea ice is cracking earlier within the yr and taking longer to freeze within the autumn.
That has left many polar bears that stay throughout the Arctic with much less ice on which to stay, hunt and reproduce.
The face of local weather change
Polar bears usually are not solely vital predators within the Arctic. For years, earlier than local weather change started affecting folks across the globe, they had been additionally the best-known face of local weather change.
Researchers stated the focus of deaths in younger bears and females in Western Hudson Bay is especially alarming.
“These are the sorts of bears we have all the time predicted can be affected by adjustments within the atmosphere,” stated Stephen Atkinson, the lead creator, who has studied polar bears for greater than 30 years.
Younger bears want vitality to develop and can’t survive lengthy intervals with out sufficient meals, and feminine bears battle as a result of they expend a lot vitality nursing and rearing offspring.
“It actually raises points in regards to the ongoing viability,” stated Derocher, who was not concerned within the research.
“That’s the reproductive engine of the inhabitants.”
The capability for polar bears within the Western Hudson Bay to breed will diminish, Atkinson stated, “since you merely have fewer younger bears that survive and turn out to be adults”.
-AAP
