Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/HUDSON BAY: A recent government survey indicated that polar bears are rapidly vanishing from the western part of Hudson Bay, at the southernmost point of Canadian Arctic.
Particularly, the number of female bears and their cubs has dramatically decreased.
Polar bears
Every five years, scientists fly over the area, which includes Churchill, a popular tourist destination dubbed the “polar bear capital of the world,” to count the bears and estimate population trends.
They spotted 194 bears during the survey conducted in late August and early September 2021, and based on that count, they estimated that there were 618 bears overall, down from 842 five years earlier.
The study concluded that there may be a decline in the abundance of the WH (Western Hudson Bay population) as compared to estimates from 2011 and 2016. Additionally, between 2011 and 2021, it “showed severe reductions in the number of adult female and subadult bears (cubs)”.
According to previous predictions about the demographic effects of climate change on polar bears, “the observed declines are consistent with those predictions,” the researchers said. The population decline was attributed to hunting as well as potential bear relocation to nearby areas.
The habitat for bears on the sea ice has been diminishing at an alarming rate as a result of the far north warming up to four times more quickly than the rest of the planet. Because of a reduction in sea ice thickness, it now breaks up earlier in the spring and freezes later in the fall. The ice is essential to bear movement, reproduction, and seal foraging.
According to US National Snow and Ice Data Center, the bay’s summer ice pack has shrunk by close to 50% since the 1980s. There were 1,200 polar bears on the western shores of Hudson Bay in the 1980s, according to a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Climate Change two years ago. This tendency, the report suggested, might result in the creatures’ near-extinction.
