THE only polar bear at Assiniboine Park Zoo is dying and it could take a decade or more for Winnipeg to acquire another member of her iconic Arctic species.
Debbie, the oldest polar bear in the world, is suffering from a variety of health ailments and is not expected to live to see age 42, zoo curator Bob Wrigley announced Thursday.
Debby, 41, the only polar bear at the Assiniboine Park Zoo, has had a series of strokes and is rapidly losing weight.
Debbie has suffered from a series of small strokes, has blood in her urine and is losing weight rapidly, according to zoological sources.
"The prognosis of recovery from age-related medical problems is not good," Wrigley said in a statement. But the 41-year-old carnivore continues to live in the only exhibit she's known since 1967, when she arrived in Winnipeg as an orphan cub from Russia.
Since that enclosure no longer meets Manitoba Conservation standards for housing polar bears, the zoo will not be able to replace its star attraction with another member of her species. No upgrades are planned for the aging facility, which is slated to be replaced by a new structure as part of a larger Assiniboine Park makeover that could cost up to $200 million.
That means the province famous for being the "polar bear capital of the world" and a world leader in polar-bear conservation will not have a single member of the charismatic species in its largest zoo for 10 to 15 years, officials say.
"We're not going to have a polar bear for an extended period of time," said Mike Stevens, chairman and president of the Zoological Society of Manitoba, a non-profit charity that raises funds and runs education programs for Assiniboine Park Zoo.
"We're not going to do a quick fix, because we don't think that will do justice to the zoo or the animal," added Stevens, who also sits on the board of the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, the new agency that will soon take over the park and quarterback its reconstruction. "What we want to have is a facility that will be aligned with a northern community and will have an underwater environment people can view."
Polar Bears International, an educational organization nominally based in Winnipeg, has long sought to build an interactive polar-bear facility that could become a major tourist attraction at Assiniboine Park.
PBI wants to help the Assiniboine Park Conservancy and the Zoological Society raise the millions required to build such a facility, which would be part of a larger zoo overhaul, secretary Bob Williams has said.
But the conservancy is still months away from working out a management agreement to take over the park and years away from a new master plan, Stevens said.
"The new conservancy is still in its infancy," he said. "It makes a lot more sense to delay (building a new) enclosure."
To meet the standards of Manitoba's Polar Bear Protection Act, enclosures must have 500 square metres of exhibit space, a 70-square-metre pool and soft ground cover such as mud or straw. They must also offer bears access to shade, hiding places and a temperature-controlled environment, as well as a balanced diet and behaviour-enrichment programs.
Assiniboine Park Zoo's polar-bear enclosure was state-of-the-art when it was built in the 1950s, thanks to then-innovative features such as an open moat and an absence of bars. But today it's too small to meet Manitoba Conservation standards and also lacks soft ground cover and a sufficiently large pool.
Too little is known about the infrastructure below the enclosure to determine whether it could be improved, Stevens said. Polar Bears International and the Assiniboine Park Conservancy would prefer to build a new facility from scratch.
A fundraising campaign would likely be launched after Debbie dies. About 18 million zoo visitors have seen her at Assiniboine Park Zoo, making her the most popular attraction in the zoo's 104-year history, Wrigley said.
"It is significant she has survived to 2008, the International Year of the Polar Bear," he said, noting the species' survival is uncertain because of climate change.
According to the World Conservation Union, 60 per cent of the world's 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears live in Canada. But five out of 13 of this country's polar bear subpopulations are believed to be in serious decline, likely because of the gradual loss of summer sea ice.
About 1,200 polar bears are believed to live along the Hudson Bay shoreline near Churchill, but the Manitoba bears are losing weight and biologists fear their numbers are dropping.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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