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Polar bears scavenge on garbage to cope with climate change
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Unhealthy scavenging: A polar bear forages for food at a garbage dump near a small community on the coast of Hudson Bay, Canada, in this screengrab of a video taken in 2021. (Reuters/Polar Bears International)
Hungry polar bears are turning to garbage dumps to fill their stomachs as their icy habitat disappears.
On Wednesday, a team of Canadian and American scientists warned that trash posed an emerging threat to already-vulnerable polar bear populations as the animals became more reliant on landfills near northern communities. This was leading to deadly conflicts with people, said the report published in the journal Oryx.
"Bears and garbage are a bad association," said coauthor Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta. "We know that very well from a brown bear and black bear perspective, and now it's an issue developing with polar bears."
Polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt seals. But with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the world, sea ice is melting out earlier in the summer and freezing up later in the fall. This is forcing bears to spend more time ashore, away from their natural prey.
To fatten up, the report says polar bears are now gathering en masse around open dumps in places in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, such as Russia's Belushya Guba, and piles of whale bone left over from Inuit hunts near Kaktovik, Alaska.
Such behavior is risky. Local wildlife managers may kill bears out of concern for public safety, and consuming garbage can make bears sick. Wrappers are often frozen into food scraps, so polar bears end up eating plastic and other nonedible materials. This can cause fatal blockages.
"Bears don't know all the negatives that come with plastic ingestion and the diseases and toxins they're likely exposed to in a [landfill] setting," said coauthor Geoff York, senior director of conservation at advocacy group Polar Bears International.
