Polar bears in the western part of Hudson Bay in Canada are in trouble. In fact, their population has declined from 1,200 individuals to 600 individuals over the last four decades. On this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, we are going to discuss what the cause was, what the effect is, and how do we right the ship. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about polar bears and the decline of a population in the western Hudson Bay. It's been studied for the last four decades. We have long-term data and we finally have the answer of how climate change is a polar
bears. So we're going to talk all about that. But before we get into it, if you're new on this podcast and you are just watching this on YouTube for the first time or on Spotify, or you're listening to this on your favorite podcast app, first thing you do subscribe, hit that notification bell. But also, if you want more information on how to protect the ocean, you can go to our website speakupforblue.com.
And if you want information to your inbox from that site, you can go to speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter and sign up for our newsletter. Let's get into the show. This is really what's happened. There were 1200 individuals four decades ago. Now there are 600 individuals. And throughout my career as a marine biologist, including schooling, I always knew that polar bears were the canary in the coal mine for climate change.
We knew that these massive animals, seven foot high, big bear, big white bear, strong, they can hunt from kilometers away. They will eat pretty much anything that comes in their way, but they prefer seals. They prefer those marine mammals that are in the sea that they can cast that are high in fatty tissue. That's what they want. That gives them their energy. It's harsh up in the Arctic. It is cold. It is windy. There's not a lot of food on the ground.
So they go out to sea and they require sea ice to float out at sea. And over the last four decades, we've seen that decline of sea ice due to climate change. That's the warming of the planet causing ice to melt. So less ice is available. That means less ice floats are available for them to use to rest. This is what happens during a certain time of the year. The polar bears will come down to the Western part of the Hudson's Bay. They will wait for the ice floats to come in.
So it's broken up ice that come in. They'll start swimming out and they'll rest on the sea ice. In fact, if they actually catch a seal, they will use the ice float to eat the seals. They have time and they can rest. It's hard to float when you're that big of an animal. And so you want to be able to rest and eat and enjoy your meal and then go back out and look for more hunt, right? This is a big part of their feeding. They need to hunt in the water and on ice floats.
And if they can't do that, then they have a problem. Then they can't eat. They do not have the energy to actually go out at sea because they are not eating. So they start to waste away inside. There's not enough sea ice. They have to find enough for them to go back and say, "Hey, you know what? I need to find food. Where am I going to find food? I'll start looking on land." I'm not sure if you've seen the Arctic, but there's not a lot around. You get maybe some foxes.
You might get some other bears around. You might get some wolves around. You might get some birds and stuff like that. Birds and berries. That's what they scour for. But there's not a lot around. And so they need to find the food as fast as they can. They need to find out the travel a lot. That means they're using more energy to find that food. And they found out that their energetic content is just a lot lower.
There was a study out of the University of Toronto by Dr. Louise Archer, lead author of the study and an international postdoctoral fellow at the university. She said, "The melting of sea ice has shortened the polar bears feeding season, which has resulted in an energy deficit for the bears for longer stretches of the year." So researchers have actually known for sometimes that the population is in trouble.
Peter Molnar, who is the senior author of the study and associate professor at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, they created a bioenergetic model that could incorporate the different ways the polar bears have been affected by the sea loss. So combined with analysis of four decades on research, which is a lot of data on the Hudson's Bay population, the scientists were able to determine the underlying mechanisms of driving these changes.
When we run the numbers, we show a declining reproductive size in this region over the last four decades. What happens when you can't eat properly, you start to waste away. And if you start to waste away, your body starts to get really tight in terms of holding on to certain parts of your body that needs to survive. So that means your reproduction goes down. That means your overall health goes down.
You lose a lot of your fatty tissue because your body's trying to dissolve that energy to try and survive and just try and use that energy up to get more food. But it's really difficult. So if a bear tries to catch a seal in open water, the seal will outswim the bear pretty much every time. It's got to be from the top into the water and drag the seal on top.
That's not an easy thing to do, but it's easier for the polar bear because it can put its four paws or three paws on the sea ice and then dip one paw in. If you ever been to the zoo and you've seen polar bears at the zoo and you see they have like a toy, it's like enrichment essentially. And it's basically like a big bin, right? It's a plastic bin that has holes in it so it can get the water in.
And what the polar bear will do is it'll dip its paw in and grab the barrel and lift it out and on top of the water. That's almost like a workout. It's almost like taking a dumbbell for it, although it weighs probably like a thousand pounds and it'll lift up the barrel and it's like lifting up the dumbbell and putting on the ground. It's kind of working out to practice using its paw to get the seal onto the ice float, right?
Obviously they're not eating seals when they're in the zoo, but that's what they're trying to mimic. So it has that same type of body type, right? It has the same type of muscle memory when it starts to take things out. So it's always good to have that type of enrichment. So how do we fix this? It's not an easy fix and there are people out there that are working hard. So the first one is the polar bear international.
So polar bear international is actually working really hard to try and help these polar bears survive and try and keep their population stable instead of declining. So they do things in about five different pillars, which I'll read off here. So they are big on to research. So PBI conducts scientific studies to understand polar bear behavior, health and public and population dynamics.
Plus technology such as GPS collars and drones to monitor movements and assess the impacts of climate change on polar bear populations. They also to go through education through initiatives like Tugger Connections webcasts and the polar bear cam. PBI provides educational content of schools, communities and the public raising awareness about the challenges polar bears face in the importance of Arctic ecosystems.
Advocacy. PBI engages with policymakers and international conservation groups to promote protective measures to polar bears. They participate in development of conservation strategies and provide scientific data to inform policy decisions and community engagement. Recognize the importance of local government. PBI collaborates with Arctic communities to develop systems to minimize human polar bear conflicts and support coexistence. And the last pillar public awareness
campaigns. Events like the International Polar Bear Day on February 27th aim to highlight the effects of climate change on polar bears and encourage global action to reduce carbon emissions. So through these efforts, PBI strives to ensure a future where polar bears can continue to thrive in their natural habitats. This is not easy work. The biggest thing that we need to do is we need to cut down on climate change emissions.
We need to engage with local communities to ensure that they are minimizing their contact with polar bears as they come more on land to hunt. As well as ensure that they are knowledgeable on what's happening and not just they are knowledgeable. Local communities teach scientists about their knowledge of polar bear movements and how that has changed over the last hundreds of years. For decades is a lot of information, but knowing that information over the last couple of centuries is really great.
And local communities in these areas typically tend to be indigenous communities. They just have that knowledge going back for centuries through their storytelling. So it'll be really interesting to see how that knowledge exchange works to protect polar bears in the future. But the big part of it is we need to ensure that climate change is addressed because the Arctic is the first thing to start to feel it.
We now know that the population of polar bears have declined by half over the past four decades and we don't want to lose these polar bears. These are very important predators to our ecosystem and they need to be there and we need to protect them. That's it for today's episode. I want to share that with you because I think it's really important to know it's not the best news, obviously, but it's news that we need to know what's happening up in Hudson Bay and what's happening up in Hudson Bay.
And what's happening with the loss of our sea ice and how that's affecting polar bear populations. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment down below either on YouTube or on Spotify. And if you're listening on this on a favorite podcast app, hit me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean.
And don't forget to hit subscribe and hit that notification bell on YouTube so that you don't miss any of the episodes we put out Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean from the true North strong and free. My name is Andrew. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.