A man who tackled a polar bear to protect his wife in the northern indigenous community of Fort Severn on the shore of Hudson Bay southeast of Churchill is on the road to recovery."The bear lunged at the woman, who slipped to the ground as her husband leapt on to the animal to prevent its attack,” Nishnawbe Aski police said in a press release.As the man fought the bear, he suffered major injuries to his extremities. A neighbour heard the dust-up, ran over, and shot the bear multiple times, reported The Guardian."Police responded to reports of gunshots, and on searching the area eventually found the bear dead in a wooded area," they wrote..Environmentalists speculate the attack could be related to altered bear behaviour caused by climate change.Polar Bears International (PBI) says ecosystem changes have lowered polar bear numbers in the western Hudson Bay subpopulation by 30% over the last 30 years, and compromised bear health. The main problem, says the organization, is the late arrival of sea ice on the bay. After many weeks of summer fasting and on-shore scavenging polar bears need sea ice to transition off land and gain access to seals, their primary food source.“It doesn’t take a lot of ice to pull the bears just into that near shore area,” says PBI, noting polar bears are spending up to an additional month on shore due to warmer of seawater, which takes longer to freeze. "Stuck on land, bears are pushed to their nutritional and energetic threshold, particularly the young, old and sick," says PBI. ."Also, poor body condition leads to smaller bears and higher cub mortality. Hungry bears also enter northern communities in search of food."For communities along the Hudson Bay coast, which are inside polar bear habitat, sea ice changes play a role in bear interactions with humans, reported The Guardian.“Each bear sort of comes with its own individual personality and its own body condition,” said Andrew Derocher, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta. "Interactions with humans depend so much on the individual bear, the annual conditions and also the location," he said. “But as a general rule, polar bears will become more unpredictable as environmental conditions change.”According to the Government of Nunavut, residents are seeing more polar bears on land. Some communities report there are too many bears."Whether increasing numbers of bears observed by residents is due to distributional shifts from ice to land as sea ice declines, is not known," said a government official in a statement."In the long term, loss of sea ice would not be beneficial for polar bears, as they need sea ice to reliably access their preferred prey. Polar bears are adaptable, and it is not known if climate change will drive them to extinction."
