[soft music] ♪ ♪ - Polar bears are the poster child for climate change.

♪ ♪ I've been working about 25 years in the Arctic.

I think the big mystery in the Arctic is what happens when the ice is disappearing sooner than ever before, and it's forming later than ever before.

What happens to the polar bears during the summer?

narrator: These polar bears specialize in hunting seals on the sea ice in winter.

In summer, they live off their fat reserves until the ice returns.

But can they last that long as the number of days with sea ice decreases?

Cinematographer Adam Ravetch is documenting one group of bears that may have found a solution.

♪ ♪ - When the tide is out, it's this huge, vast rock boulder field, and you think nothing could live here.

It's really harsh.

♪ ♪ We came here thinking, "Oh, well, this is a place where polar bears are very desperate."

But here in Seal River, these animals seem to be thriving.

They don't look desperate at all.

The question is, what are the bears doing to adapt?

[soft guitar music] Think today's our day?

- Every day is our day.

- "Every day is our day."

♪ ♪ Every year, thousands of beluga whales arrive to Seal River.

These are beautiful white whales.

♪ ♪ [laughs] Look at that.

I don't even know what I'm getting, but look at that.

♪ ♪ narrator: Tens of thousands of belugas come to the safety of this shallow estuary to molt their skin and give birth.

♪ ♪ - When the tide rises, when the water comes in, the rocks submerge, and the beluga whales move in.

[eerie music] ♪ ♪ And you start to see bears climbing out on those rocks.

♪ ♪ narrator: Big, hungry males looking for beluga.

♪ ♪ This is what Adam has come to film.

♪ ♪ [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - First, all you're worried about is, "Can I do it?

Am I able to capture this?"

♪ ♪ It's amazing.

We captured it from the air.

We captured it from the water.

♪ ♪ Into the second week, we were starting to see a lot of it.

And then you start to get your head around what's actually happening here.

♪ ♪ You see, it's not just one desperate bear or a couple desperate bears trying to hunt beluga.

They were actually working together.

The minute one captured a beluga, another one would move in.

narrator: Adam sees signs of cooperation that he's never seen before among normally solitary bears.

[bear roars] - Even if there was a little fighting going on, they would eventually share together, and so it's a real collaboration.

We're seeing socialization in bears that I don't think has ever really been documented before.

[soft music] narrator: A mother with her cub in tow heads out into the boulder field.

♪ ♪ No one has filmed a mother and cub hunting this way before.

♪ ♪ - And the tide was high, but the rocks were submerged, and they could push off the rocks.

We watched her hunting in the shallows of Hudson Bay.

♪ ♪ It's an amazing teaching moment to teach her young cub how to eat beluga here in the summertime.

♪ ♪ And it's just a great honor to be there and to witness it.

♪ ♪ narrator: The ability to adapt is a useful trait in a changing world.

But the environment at Seal River is unique.

Nowhere else on Earth do polar bears have so much summertime prey, or such a handy way to catch it.

♪ ♪ - This boulder field is a unique ecosystem that bears have learned to use as a tool to hunt beluga whales.

♪ ♪ So it's a huge community of bears that, in this one specific area, are all thriving together.

You know, the credo, I think, of Seal River is, "We hunt together.

We survive together."

♪ ♪