Polar Bears Eating Their Young As Arctic Ice Thins

An adult male polar bear with the remains of a cub he separated from its mother and killed in the Churchill Wildlife Managment Area on November 20, 2009.

The late refreezing of Arctic sea ice in the fall could be forcing some starving and desperate polar bears along Canada’s western Hudson Bay to resort to cannibalism, according to biologists.

Bears need a platform of ice to hunt for seals, their primary food source. But climate change has caused the sea ice in western Hudson Bay to break up about three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago.

That means that by late November, the bear’s stored body fat is nearly depleted. And without a frozen sea to hunt on, they are resorting more and more to separating cubs from their mothers and then eating the young, according to Polar Bears International president Robert Buchanan.

Some Inuit observers say that such infanticide is normal and say it shouldn’t be linked to climate change.

But Buchanan points out that such acts of cannibalism, which were usually seen about once a year two decades ago, have been reported eight times so far this fall in western Hudson Bay.

"We have observed that the average body condition of the western Hudson Bay polar bears has been declining for almost 30 years," said John Gunter of Frontiers North Adventures in Churchill, Manitoba.

Killings of cubs for food by adult males has also been observed elsewhere in the Arctic during the past few years, including in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and in the southern Beaufort Sea. Both locations have experienced dramatic reductions in sea ice over the summer.