A polar bear walks alongside the shore of Hudson Bay close to Churchill, Manitoba, on Aug. 23, 2010. Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay — on the southern fringe of the Arctic — are persevering with to die in excessive numbers, a brand new authorities survey launched Thursday discovered.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press by way of AP, File

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Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press by way of AP, File

A polar bear walks alongside the shore of Hudson Bay close to Churchill, Manitoba, on Aug. 23, 2010. Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay — on the southern fringe of the Arctic — are persevering with to die in excessive numbers, a brand new authorities survey launched Thursday discovered.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press by way of AP, File

Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay — on the southern fringe of the Arctic — are persevering with to die in excessive numbers, a brand new authorities survey of the land carnivore has discovered. Females and bear cubs are having an particularly onerous time.

Researchers surveyed Western Hudson Bay — residence to Churchill, the city referred to as “the Polar Bear Capital of the World,” — by air in 2021 and estimated there have been 618 bears, in comparison with the 842 in 2016, once they had been final surveyed.

“The actual decline is a lot larger than I would have expected,” stated Andrew Derocher, a biology professor on the University of Alberta who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for practically 4 a long time. Derocher was not concerned within the examine.

Since the Nineteen Eighties, the variety of bears within the area has fallen by practically 50%, 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 and kinds once more within the lengthy winter. They use it to hunt, perching close to holes within the thick ice to identify seals, their favourite meals, developing for air. But 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 12 months and taking longer to freeze within the fall.

That has left many polar bears that reside throughout the Arctic with much less ice on which to reside, hunt and reproduce.

Polar bears usually are not solely crucial predators within the Arctic. For years, earlier than local weather change started affecting individuals 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 alarming.

“Those are the types of bears we’ve always predicted would be affected by changes in the environment,” stated Stephen Atkinson, the lead creator who has studied polar bears for greater than 30 years.

Young bears want power to develop and can’t survive lengthy intervals with out sufficient meals and feminine bears wrestle as a result of they expend a lot power nursing and rearing offspring.

“It certainly raises issues about the ongoing viability,” Derocher stated. “That is the reproductive engine of the population.”

The capability for polar bears within the Western Hudson Bay to breed will diminish, Atkinson stated, “because you simply have fewer young bears that survive and become adults.”