Arctic animals

The Arctic's animals are a short list with big numbers, and a trip is built around which of them you want most. This page is the map: which animal, where, in which month and on which ship. The polar bear and walrus have pages of their own with the odds, rules and prices in full.

What animals live in the Arctic?

Mostly animals of the sea ice and the coast: polar bears, walruses, four kinds of seal (ringed, bearded, harp and hooded), three whales that stay through the winter (narwhal, beluga and bowhead), and on land Arctic foxes, reindeer and caribou, musk oxen, Arctic hares, wolves and wolverines.¹²³⁴ Seabirds outnumber them all: Svalbard alone has about 615,000 pairs of Brünnich's guillemots.⁵ There are no penguins anywhere in the north.⁶

What are the top 10 animals to see in the Arctic?

Our ranking, by how much a sighting shapes a trip, with the place and months that give the best odds and each species' global IUCN Red List category with the year of its assessment:⁷⁸

Where can you see Arctic animals, region by region?

Choose the region by the animal you care about most:

Churchill sits on subarctic tundra rather than in the high Arctic, but its bears and belugas are why it belongs on the list.⁹ Visit Greenland says its national park holds fewer animals than Svalbard, so go to Greenland for musk oxen, not for numbers.¹⁹

What wildlife can you see in Svalbard?

The widest cast in one week: Visit Svalbard lists the Svalbard reindeer, Arctic fox and polar bear on land, and seals, walruses, whales and a varied bird life.²⁵ Bears are the uncertain part, with no polar bear safaris and about 300 bears living on Svalbard all year.⁴⁰ The rest is easier:

• Svalbard reindeer number about 22,000, live only in Svalbard and, with no natural predators, often approach visitors slowly.²⁰¹¹
• Arctic foxes live almost everywhere on the archipelago, and 84% to 97% are the white form, which turns brown-gray on the back in summer.¹⁸ At Alkhornet, at the mouth of Isfjorden, seabirds nest on the cliff, foxes hunt below and reindeer graze nearby.¹⁷
• Whales: belugas are the most numerous and most often seen, near tidal glacier fronts; narwhals turn up in Nordaustlandet's fjords and blue whales at the entrance to Hinlopen Strait.¹⁶¹⁵¹⁷

How close can you get to Arctic animals?

Not very: Svalbard's law keeps you about 1,000 ft (300 m) from polar bears, and AECO, the expedition cruise association, sets minimums where no law does.⁴¹⁴²

So pack binoculars, as HX tells its Svalbard guests.¹¹

When is the best time to see Arctic animals?

June to August for most animals, by ship; October and November for polar bears in Churchill; late April to early June for narwhals at the floe edge.⁹¹⁴ Month by month:

Which whales live in the Arctic?

The narwhal, the beluga and the bowhead stay through the winter, and in summer humpback, fin and minke whales arrive to feed; Visit Greenland says up to 15 species visit its waters.²

• Narwhal: males carry a spiraled tusk up to 10 ft (3 m) long; narwhals are most numerous in the eastern Canadian Arctic and along Greenland's coasts.¹⁵
• Beluga: males reach 15 ft (4.5 m) and 3,300 lb (1,500 kg), and calves are born gray, turning white by about 14 for females and 20 for males.¹⁶
• Bowhead: the only baleen whale that lives in the Arctic all year, with blubber up to 20 in (50 cm) thick, and it may live more than 200 years.²² Nunavut's Tallurutiup Imanga protects critical habitat for bowheads, narwhals and belugas.³⁰

Which seals live in the Arctic?

Mainly ringed, bearded, harp and hooded seals, and the sea ice they breed on is shrinking.³ In October 2025 the IUCN moved the hooded seal from Vulnerable to Endangered and the bearded and harp seals from Least Concern to Near Threatened; the ringed seal, the polar bear's favorite prey, stays Least Concern.³⁷¹ In Svalbard, Oceanwide looks for ringed and bearded seals in Raudfjord and Hinlopen Strait, and HX says harp, ringed and hooded seals are most plentiful in July and August.¹⁷¹¹

What seabirds live in the Arctic?

Auks, gulls, fulmars and kittiwakes, in colonies that can hold hundreds of thousands of pairs:

• Brünnich's guillemot (thick-billed murre): 142 colonies in Svalbard, the largest of more than 100,000 pairs on southeastern Spitsbergen, Hopen and Bjørnøya, though the monitored colonies have lost about 4% a year since the mid-1990s.⁵ In Canada, look at the Baillarge Bay cliffs near Arctic Bay.¹⁴
• Little auk: about 8 in (20 cm) long, nesting in more than 200 Svalbard colonies, mostly in scree slopes in Hornsund, Bellsund and around Magdalenafjorden.⁴⁷
• Puffins: Atlantic puffins breed on Jan Mayen, where the northern fulmar is the most common bird; in Alaska, horned and tufted puffins nest on Round Island.³⁵⁵⁰
• Ivory gull: it feeds at the drift ice edge and on the leftovers of polar bear kills; Svalbard's breeding population fell by about 7% a year from 2015 to 2025, and Canada's has dropped by 70%.²⁴

What animals live on the Arctic tundra?

Reindeer and caribou, musk oxen, Arctic foxes, Arctic hares, wolves and wolverines, though Svalbard's only land mammals are the reindeer, the Arctic fox and the polar bear.¹⁴²⁵ Greenland's musk oxen live naturally from Washington Land to just south of Ittoqqortoormiit, and cruises reach them in the national park's southern parts, north of Scoresby Sund; its wild reindeer live in the west, around Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq among other places.¹¹⁹ The Arctic hare lives only in Greenland and northern Canada and, protected in the national park, can let you within a few yards.¹ Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge holds the Porcupine and Central Arctic caribou herds, musk oxen, wolves, wolverines and all three North American bears.⁴

What is the main predator in the Arctic?

The polar bear, which Visit Greenland calls the world's largest land predator; it hunts ringed seals above all and also kills belugas and narwhals.¹ At sea, killer whales are the bowhead's only known natural predator and, with polar bears, the main predators of narwhals, belugas and walrus calves.^22151636

What is the largest Arctic animal?

The bowhead whale, among the animals that live there all year: 46 to 59 ft (14 to 18 m) long and 165,000 to 220,000 lb (75,000 to 100,000 kg).²² Blue whales visit Svalbard in summer, and HX counts one as a very lucky sighting.¹¹ On land it is the polar bear, whose males can weigh over 1,760 lb (800 kg).¹

What is the most common Arctic animal?

Seabirds, by a distance. The little auk is Svalbard's most numerous bird, with a crude estimate of more than one million breeding pairs, and Brünnich's guillemots make up more than 60% of the seabird biomass in the Barents Sea.⁴⁷⁵

Are there penguins in the Arctic?

No. The warm waters of the equator are a barrier to penguins, and the British Antarctic Survey says that if they reached the Arctic they would find their niche taken by the puffin, which, unlike a penguin, can fly away from land predators.⁶ For penguins, see our Antarctic wildlife and penguin species pages.

Which Arctic animals are endangered?

On the IUCN Red List, the hooded seal is Endangered (2025); the polar bear (2015), walrus (2025), reindeer (2016) and Atlantic puffin (2018) are Vulnerable; and the bearded and harp seals (2025) and ivory gull (2018) are Near Threatened.⁷⁸ Sea ice loss is the common thread.³ Polar Bears International says a 2020 study found that without action on climate change, all but a few polar bear populations will be lost by the end of the century.¹⁰ Protection works where hunting was the problem: Svalbard's walruses grew from about 100 in 1952 to about 5,503 in 2018.¹³

Which Arctic trip shows you the most animals?

A summer Svalbard cruise, for the most kinds of animal in the fewest days. Per person, as listed on October 14 and 15, 2026:

HX's extra anniversary discount applies only to bookings made by November 9, 2026.⁵³ Skip Svalbard if narwhals or musk oxen are the goal: go to the Nunavut floe edge in spring or Northeast Greenland in summer. Skip it too if a polar bear is all that matters; Churchill in October is the surer bet, compared in our polar bear tours guide. For the full market, see Arctic cruises.