Arctic Wildlife Research Suffers as Geopolitical Competition Grows

Decades ago, one of the world’s largest subpopulations of nesting eider ducks spent its summers on tiny Mitivik Island, near the mouth of Hudson Bay. But as concern grew, in the 1990s, over their steep decline globally, the Canadian government set up a rudimentary research station near the island in the hopes of forestalling a collapse.  

The modest investment paid enormous dividends over the next 30 years as Inuit partners from nearby Southampton Island, who hunt common and king eiders for food and feathers, worked with scientists from all over the world to solve the mystery of where the birds spent their winters and the causes of, and remedy for, their initial decline. In the field for months at a time, researchers also gained critical insights into how climate change, disease, diminishing sea ice, and polar bears were affecting bird populations. 

As remarkably successful as the pioneering research station was, though, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change department quietly shut it down in 2024. By then, the number of nesting eiders had crashed again, from a high of 8,000 pairs to just a few hundred. 

Today, federal research continues in only three of the 14 migratory bird sanctuaries in the Arctic. Hundreds of other wildlife research endeavors in the circumpolar world, including in Greenland and the U.S., have also been shuttered in recent years. 

Support for Arctic research has always ebbed and flowed, says a scientist. “But what we are seeing now is unprecedented.”

In the past, funding to monitor wildlife in the Arctic often had to be justified by its relevance to oil and gas development and how roads, pipelines, and oil wells would affect animals such as migrating caribou, according to Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. But as the search for Arctic oil and gas began to ramp down in the late 2000s, due to low natural gas prices and breakthroughs in fracking for oil and gas that spurred new production in the south, climate change became a priority. 

The current circumpolar decline in funding, Hinzman said, is not just about rising costs. It stems from governments shifting priorities once again, this time from climate change to national security issues and the search for rare minerals. According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, geopolitical tensions are also undermining the work of the Arctic Council, an international forum comprising the eight Arctic countries that plays a key role in monitoring environmental changes in the region. 

While support for research in the Arctic wanes, Canada is investing $405 million to advance the construction of a new highway to the Arctic coast to facilitate resource development and connect remote communities, part of a $40 billion plan to assert sovereignty over its Arctic territory. 

Research in Alaska has been particularly hard hit by the suspension of hundreds of climate-based collaborations with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, and by the closure last year of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States after the National Science Foundation eliminated its operating grants. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of U.S. research publications on climate change in Greenland fell by 32 percent. And in July the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the territory’s leading environmental research center, temporarily halted any new collaboration with U.S. partners when President Donald Trump threatened to take over the island. 

“There have always been ebbs and flows in the support for environmental monitoring in the Arctic,” said Hinzman. “But what we are seeing now is unprecedented. It’s heartbreaking because we need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life.” 

The decline in Arctic research comes at a time when at least 96 Arctic and sub-Arctic mammal and bird species may be responding to warmer winters, earlier spring snowmelt, and profound landscape changes by migrating earlier in the year and traveling farther afield, sometimes in new directions.

Studies from a now shuttered Hudson Bay research station led to tighter regulations on hunting that fueled an eider resurgence.

But dozens of studies have shown that these journeys don’t always lead to more food. And they often expose birds to additional parasites and pathogens and put them at greater risk of predation. The new migrations also happen at a time when critical stopover sites — like the Salton Sea, in California — are being badly degraded by drought and development.

Polar bears and eiders are among the many animals that appear to be struggling with rapidly warming northern marine environments, from the Baltic to the Canadian Arctic Ocean to the eastern seaboard, stretching from Newfoundland to Maine. But without researchers in the field, it’s difficult to predict how or whether these species may adapt. 

The situation was far different when eiders began their mysterious worldwide decline in the 1990s. Then, researchers working in Mitivik, in the East Bay Migratory Bird Sanctuary, which would later be named the Qaqsauqtuuq Migratory Bird Sanctuary, implanted satellite transmitters into the abdomens of eiders and learned where they were overwintering. The findings led to tighter regulations on eider hunting in Canada and Greenland that dramatically boosted eider numbers. 

That is, until they crashed again due to disease and polar bear predation. In 2005, Grant Gilchrist, the founder of the research station, and his colleagues identified an outbreak of avian cholera — which is rare in the Arctic and likely linked to global warming — that would kill as many as 3,000 nesting females in 2006 and about half the population over the eight seasons it spread through the nesting colony. 

Gilchrist was also on hand to witness how receding sea ice, brought on by climate change, forced polar bears onto land just when the eiders were sitting on their eggs. “The bears were like grazing cows leisurely moving through a pasture, stopping to feed [on eggs] whenever they were hungry,” he said. And herring gulls, which can’t force an eider off its nest, learned to eat the eggs that the bears had missed while the eiders were away.

Canadian Wildlife Service scientist Jennifer Provencher and her colleagues discovered that even though the eiders nesting in Mitivik hosted larger-than-expected communities of gastrointestinal worms and flukes, which benefit from warming temperatures, the parasites reduced the ducks’ exposure to contaminants such as mercury and lead. The parasites appear to absorb and clear contaminants from eider tissues. This is significant because mercury and lead, which are leaching from melting permafrost in many parts of the Arctic, can result in reproductive failure in ducks, and they can be harmful to humans who rely on ducks for food. The Inuit have higher levels of mercury than the general Canadian population.

Other researchers found that eiders, like some other animals exposed to deadly disease, eventually developed an immunity to avian cholera.

“Had we not been there, we would never have been able to document any of this,” said Gilchrist, who says he has little doubt that most of what Mitivik researchers discovered is happening in other parts of the Arctic. 

Determining how polar bears are faring in Canada is becoming difficult, if not impossible, because of a lack of funding, a scientist says.

Environment and Climate Change Canada did not respond to questions about funding cuts and the cessation of research in Mitivik. In a statement, the department said it is “committed to the long-term conservation of biological biodiversity and abundance,” noting that experts are working on new research programs with territorial governments and Indigenous organizations, and with new technologies to help track and understand birds and other animals, including polar bears.  

Still, Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta scientist who has conducted research over the past 40 years on polar bears in Norway, Canada, and Alaska, notes that support for polar bear research in Canada is at an all-time low. Determining how polar bears are faring in Canada — which is home to 13 of the world’s 19 polar bear populations — is becoming increasingly difficult, he says, if not impossible, because of a lack of government funding.

“We’ve pretty much stopped any research beyond the long-term monitoring in Western Hudson Bay and a project in James Bay” funded by a private foundation, he says. “There is almost no other research on polar bears in Canada now.”

Ornithologist Mark Mallory spent 12 years conducting research at migratory bird nesting sites across the Canadian Arctic while working for the Canadian Wildlife Service, but he left that job for a research chair at Acadia University in part because of the high cost of conducting research in the polar regions and the endless struggle to secure consistent funding. Mallory is still very much interested in what is happening in the Arctic, but his years in the field and as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Arctic Science have given him a broader perspective on the challenges scientists face when trying to figure out how a warming climate is affecting wildlife. 

“No credible scientist would deny that not enough is being invested in long-term monitoring,” he says. “But the bigger problem is not enough is being done to act on what we know is happening… Do we really think 10 or 20 more years of data showing ranges shrinking north, or clutch sizes reducing, or skinnier species is going to change anything in the minds of politicians or the public?”

Gilchrist appreciates Mallory’s frustrations with governments that refuse to act on climate change, but he — like many Arctic researchers — still believes that long-term monitoring with Inuit partners is essential. “Somebody should still be out in nature monitoring wildlife and the natural environment, and quantifying changes that are occurring or not occurring,” he said.

He doesn’t know whether the eiders of Mitivik Island will eventually return or whether they have found safer areas to nest. Because of the high costs of operating at Qaqsauqtuuq and the increased odds of running into polar bears, Gilchrist is now focusing his research at a site on Baffin Island, where it is cheaper to work and where there are fewer bears.