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6 days ago · The polar bears of Hudson Bay live in a seasonal ice area, where the ice melts completely in summer and freezes again in fall. Follow the bears on our tracker as they hunt seals when the bay is frozen or are forced ashore during the ice-free seasons.
- Overview
- Surprisingly active
- Survival of the fattest
The bears can’t thrive on land, a concerning discovery as sea ice continues to disappear at a rapid pace, a new study says.
Polar bears are a common sight in the western Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada.
For the polar bears of Manitoba, Canada, the sea ice that envelops western Hudson Bay for most of the year is the ideal hunting ground for a feast of blubber-rich seals. But then come the dog days of summer, when the ice melts and the bears are forced onto land. There, life is no picnic for these giant creatures.
Deprived of adequate food supplies, the bears must live off their fat reserves for several months. Now, climate change is causing that wait to grow even longer, as warming temperatures melt the sea ice earlier in the spring and solidifies it later in the fall. The Arctic, research shows, is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The question is: How will polar bears adapt to more time spent on land?
The answer, according to a new study published in Nature this week, is not very well. The study shows the carnivores forage for food, such as birds and berries, rather than resting, which is what scientists thought most bears did while on land. But the study also concludes that doing so causes the bears to spend as much extra energy as they gain from eating the food. During the study's three-week research period, bears lost an average of more than three pounds of weight each day while waiting for the ice to form again.
“There’s no winning strategy” for the bears, says study leader Anthony Pagano, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska. “They will not be able to find the food they need on land.”
Polar bears live in 19 regions across the Arctic, from Canada to Greenland to Russia. While some populations live on permanent ice, others inhabit seasonal ice. Climate change has caused ice loss to some degree in all the regions, leading to drastic population declines. As a result, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists polar bears as vulnerable to extinction.
Between 1979 and 2015, the length of time without ice in western Hudson Bay has risen by three weeks, according to the study. About 800 polar bears dwell in the western side of Hudson Bay, a decline of 30 percent since 1980. Those bears now spend an average of 130 days on land a year, a number expected to increase by 5 to 10 days per decade in the future.
To glean how the polar bears spend their time on land, Pagano and his team placed GPS-enabled video trackers on 20 Hudson Bay bears for three-week periods in the summers between 2019 and 2022. The scientists tracked the animals’ diet, movement, behavior, changes in body mass, and how much energy they exerted each day. (Learn about a newly identified population of polar bears.)
“Previously we only had snippets [of information] on what the bears do on land,” says Pagano, who led a similar study several years ago focusing on the bears’ activity on sea ice.
10:50
Polar bear cubs must grow up fast in the unpredictable Arctic
Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada who has long studied polar bears, points out that some individuals are in better shape than others. (See a photo of a starving polar bear that went viral in 2015.)
“Some animals can go many, many months before they’re in trouble, while others may run out of energy in a matter of weeks,” says Derocher, who wasn't involved in the study. He says the fatter a bear is from the months of feeding on the sea ice, the better it can deal with the ice-free period. “I call it survival of the fattest,” he says.
With polar bears spending more time on land and actively moving about the landscape in search of food, “there’s an element of desperation that goes on with some of these individual bears that puts them into potential conflict with people."
In the past, the polar bears have usually come to shore and congregated near the town of Churchill in Manitoba, which has a long history of managing polar bears, including maintaining a holding facility known as “polar bear jail” where dangerous bears are held before being relocated far from town.
But there are now signs that more polar bears may be migrating farther north in search of sea ice, potentially moving into communities that are nowhere near as well set up to deal with problem bears as Churchill is.
“These bears may smell some dog food and go right in,” says Derocher. “It’s not like they want to feed on our garbage. They want to go out on the ice and start hunting seals. But increasingly they’re stuck on land.”
- Stefan Lovgren
- 11 min
No new records yet in 2022. Although the long-term trends are clear in the Arctic —such as declining Arctic sea ice, warming ocean and atmospheric temperatures, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, shifts in plant phenology and Arctic greening—there is also large year-to-year variability.
Aug 27, 2022 · According to Andrew Derocher this morning, the last of his teams' tagged polar bears have come ashore in Western Hudson Bay, in the last week of August. That makes two years out of the last three when the tagged WH bears came ashore as late, or later than, they had done in 2009 (a very…
As temperatures continue to drop, bands of shorefast ice mixed with young nilas ice have formed along the coast of Hudson Bay—allowing polar bears who have been largely fasting onshore since July and August to return to hunting seals.
Feb 25, 2022 · Sea ice is essential habitat for polar bears—but across the Arctic, it is disappearing quickly. As a result of rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis, sea-ice concentrations in the Arctic have declined in every decade since the start of satellite records in 1979.
People also ask
What does a changing climate mean for polar bears?
Are polar bears adapting to a warming Arctic?
Did sea ice break-up affect polar bears?
Do polar bears live on permanent ice?
Will 2022 be a low sea ice year?
Why are polar bears dying?
Dec 15, 2022 · Carbon Brief has dug through the literature on polar bears and climate change and spoken to experts from around the world to determine what a changing climate means for polar bears. The consensus is clear – as Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are finding it harder to hunt, mate and breed.
