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REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, TORONTO – Polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay, on the southern edge of the Arctic, continue to die in large numbers. The government survey of land carnivores found that she and her young were struggling.

The researchers studied western Hudson Bay or the home of Churchill, a city nicknamed “the capital”. Polar bears World’ by air in 2021. The survey estimates there are 618 bears, up from 842 in 2016, when last surveyed.

“The actual decline has been much larger than expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta biology professor who has studied polar bears in Hudson Bay for nearly four decades.

Since the 1980s, the number of bears in the region has dropped by almost 50%. The ice essential to the survival of the birds had disappeared.

Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice, which shrinks during the hotter summers and replenishes during the long winter. They use it for hunting, perched near holes in thick ice to watch for seals, its favorite food emerging for air.

But because the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world due to climate change, sea ice cracks early in the year and takes longer to freeze in the fall. These conditions have left many polar bears in the Arctic with less ice to live, hunt and breed.

The polar bear is not only a critical predator in the Arctic. For years, before climate change started affecting people around the world, the animal was also the most famous face of climate change.

Researchers say the concentration of cub and female deaths in western Hudson Bay is concerning. “These are the types of bears we always expect to be affected by environmental change,” said lead author Stephen Atkinson, who has studied polar bears for more than 30 years.

Young bears need energy to grow and cannot survive for long without enough food. While bears struggle because they expend a lot of energy feeding and raising their cubs.

The reproductive capacity of polar bears in western Hudson Bay will be reduced. “Because you just have fewer young bears surviving and maturing,” Atkinson said.