I used to think polar bears just sort of wandered around on ice until they bumped into a seal.
Turns out, the reality is way more calculated—and honestly, kind of unsettling when you realize how patient these animals can be. A polar bear hunting at a breathing hole isn’t charging across the tundra or making dramatic leaps; it’s doing something far stranger: standing completely still for hours, sometimes days, waiting for a single moment when a ringed seal surfaces to breathe. The ice across the Arctic is riddled with these breathing holes—agluut, the Inuit call them—and seals maintain several of them throughout the winter, chewing and scratching to keep them open as the ice thickens. A bear doesn’t need to find a seal; it just needs to find the hole and wait. The math is brutal: seals need air every fifteen to twenty minutes, and they’ve got maybe five or six holes scattered across their territory. Eventually, they have to surface at one of them.
Here’s the thing: the waiting isn’t passive. A bear will approach downwind so the seal can’t smell it, then settle into a crouch near the hole—sometimes covering its black nose with a paw, though researchers still debate whether that’s actually camouflage or just coincidence. The bear’s breathing slows. Its body goes nearly motionless. One study from the 1970s tracked a bear that waited for over 11 hours at a single hole without moving more than a few feet. When the seal finally surfaces, the sequence happens in seconds: the bear hears the exhale, lunges forward, smashes through the thin ice crust with its front paws, and hooks the seal with its claws before it can dive. If the hole is too small, the bear will widen it with its jaws, hauling the seal up onto the ice in one violent pull.
The Geometry of Hunger on a Shrinking Platform
Wait—maybe I should back up. The reason this hunting method matters so much is because it’s become the primary way polar bears feed during the coldest months, roughly from November through May, give or take depending on latitude. When the sea ice forms a solid platform, seals breed and give birth in dens beneath the snow, and bears can access them either by ambush at breathing holes or by smelling out birth lairs and crashing through the roof. But breathing-hole hunting is the more reliable strategy, especially for younger or less experienced bears who haven’t perfected the den-crushing technique. The success rate isn’t great—some estimates put it at around 10 to 20 percent per attempt—but the caloric payoff is massive. A single ringed seal can provide 8,000 to 10,000 calories, mostly from blubber, which is exactly what a bear needs to survive the lean summer months when the ice melts and hunting becomes nearly impossible.
The problem, of course, is that the ice is melting earlier and forming later each year.
I guess it makes sense that as the hunting season shrinks, bears are spending more time on land, scavenging and fasting, losing body mass at rates that weren’t typical even a few decades ago. Some populations—like those in Hudson Bay—are now on land for over a month longer than they were in the 1980s, and the bears are noticeably thinner. Females are giving birth to smaller cubs, and cub survival rates are dropping. The breathing-hole strategy only works if there’s ice thick enough to support a 900-pound bear and stable enough to keep the seals coming back to predictable locations. When the ice is fractured, unstable, or absent altogether, the whole system collapses. Bears are adaptable, sure—they’ll eat bird eggs, kelp, even garbage—but nothing replaces the energy density of seal blubber. Definately not berries. Not even close.
What a Bear Knows That We Can Only Measure
There’s something almost eerie about watching footage of a bear at a breathing hole, if you ever get the chance. The stillness is unnatural for an animal that size. No fidgeting. No visible impatience. Just this low, focused intensity, like the bear has entered a different state of time. Researchers have tried to quantify the sensory cues bears use—vibrations in the ice, the sound of a seal’s breath, maybe even the slight change in air pressure when a seal approaches from below—but honestly, we’re still guessing at a lot of it. What we do know is that polar bears have an extraordinary sense of smell, capable of detecting a seal den under three feet of snow from over half a mile away, and their hearing is acute enough to pick up the faint scratch of claws on ice. At the breathing hole, they’re probably using all of it: smell, sound, vibration, and maybe something we haven’t even identified yet.
The Patience We Can’t Afford to Imitate Anymore
Anyway, the larger point is that this hunting method—so specific, so tied to a particular kind of landscape—is becoming harder to execute. The bears are still trying, still waiting at holes that may not produce a seal for days, but the windows are narrowing. Some bears are travelling farther to find stable ice, expending energy they can’t easily recoup. Others are shifting their behavior entirely, which sounds adaptive until you realize that most alternatives don’t work. A polar bear is built for ice, for ambush, for explosive bursts of power after long stretches of stillness. Take away the platform, and you take away the strategy. And without the strategy, you’re left with an animal that’s just hungry, waiting for something that used to be there.
