Last month, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced plans to explore protecting marine life around Churchill by establishing a national marine conservation area in western Hudson Bay, calling it “one of the most extraordinary places on Earth.”
Drawing boundaries for marine protection is difficult, however, mainly because there isn’t enough data on where sea creatures live. But since the Churchill area has an abundant polar-bear population — and scientists know much more about their movements — the bears could prove an essential “umbrella species,” indicating where protection is most needed.
According to the University of Alberta’s polar-bear expert, Andrew Derocher of the Faculty of Science, if you protect polar bears’ habitat, you end up protecting everything else they need to survive — such as seals, fish and seaweed. In turn, the bears provide critical benefits to ecosystems by leaving behind carrion that feeds scavengers like Arctic foxes, wolves, ravens and gulls.
In a new study published in Arctic Science and in partnership with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and Environment and Climate Change Canada, Derocher’s team examined 20 years of satellite data from 355 bears in western Hudson Bay, and found they tended to dwell in a predictable “core zone” of about 66,000 square kilometres. That high-use area, they say, could serve as an effective marine protected area, especially for species that depend on sea ice.
The authors note that climate change and melting ice may eventually reduce polar bear habitat. But as many Arctic marine species “lack distribution and habitat use information, polar bears as an umbrella species can form an objective starting point” for all sea ice habitats across the North.