Maternal den site fidelity of polar bears in western Hudson Bay

Abstract

Seasonal migrations allow to access temporally varying resources and individuals may show fidelity to specific locations. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are a sea ice dependent species that migrate between marine and terrestrial habitats, the latter being important for parturition and early cub rearing. However, fidelity to maternity den sites is poorly understood. We assessed polar bear maternal den site fidelity of the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation in Manitoba, Canada. Using capture and telemetry data collected between 1979 - 2018, we examined site fidelity from 188 maternity den locations from 78 individuals. We calculated within-individual inter-year distances between dens, and compared these to between-individual distances via non-parametric bootstrapping. We used generalised additive models to assess how maternal age, years between denning events, and sea ice conditions affected site fidelity. We found some evidence of site fidelity, as within-individual inter-year distances were smaller than between-individual den distances by approximately 18.5 km. As time between captures increased, inter-den distances also increased (ranging from approximately 25 km to 55 km), but no other variables significantly affected fidelity. Our findings suggest that western Hudson Bay polar bears show a moderate amount of fidelity to denning areas, but not necessarily to specific sites.