Polar bear population in western Hudson Bay has been reduced by about half » Yale Climate Connections

Transcript:

Over the past few decades, the polar bear population in Canada’s western Hudson Bay has dropped dramatically.

Archer: “There’s about half as many polar bears there in recent years, compared to the late 1980s, 1990s.”

Louise Archer is a biologist at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.

She and her colleagues recently published a study that pins the blame for that population decline on climate change.

The problem comes down to food. Every winter, the polar bears wander out onto the frozen ice of Hudson Bay, where they spend the next few months eating seals and fattening up before the ice melts in the summer.

There’s little food for the bears back on land, so it’s important that they get enough to eat each winter.

But as the climate warms, that’s getting harder.

Archer: “The sea ice is melting earlier in the year and it’s refreezing later … so all in all since the 1980s, we’ve seen polar bears spending about three to four weeks longer on land. That means three to four weeks shorter time on ice hunting and building up those fat reserves.”

Without that food, the bears are less likely to reproduce and the cubs are less likely to survive. So climate change is putting this iconic species in peril.

Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media