The town of Churchill, at the southern tip of the Arctic Canada, is considered by experts as the capital of polar bears. Hundreds of these creatures appear periodically in this small city that lives, in part, from the tourism that these animals bring, but unfortunately in recent years alarms have gone off due to a significant drop in the area’s population.
It is that according to the researchers who are in charge of keeping a count of the individuals that live in this region, there went from having 842 polar bears to only 618 in the course of the last five years. The most worrying reality about this event in the north of Canada is the dramatic decline of females and their pupswhich began to disappear as a product of global warming.
“The observed declines are consistent with predictions about the effects of changing temperatures on polar bear demographics,” the scientists noted. who remarked that there is a possibility that the animals may have moved to neighboring regions of this town of Canadaalthough they also do not rule out the effects of excessive hunting in these populations.
The northernmost sectors of the planet are the most affected point due to the rise in temperatures throughout the globe, where studies indicate that they increase four times faster than with the rest. Since the 1980s, the Hudson Bay region, where Churchill’s villagelost 50% of the population of these creatures and if this trend continues, it is expected that they may disappear from this area in the coming decades.
without pups
One of the things that alarms researchers the most is the low number of offspring that are born among these creatures, which gradually makes the existing populations become larger, thus increasing mortality.
“There were very few cubs produced in 2021,” Andrew Derocher, a polar bear specialist from the North American country, told Reuters. Also, he asserted: “When you have years of bad ice, older animals are more vulnerable and prone to death.”