A recent survey, published in Science, implies that a inhabitants of polar bears can even uniquely adapt to continue to exist the decline of Arctic sea ice. For the final 40 years, the gap has misplaced 13 p.c of its ice quilt every decade. That’s esteem taking away a chunk of ice the dimensions of Eire every 300 and sixty five days. This threatens Artic animals esteem polar bears that depend on sea ice to feed.
The researchers reported a previously unstudied inhabitants of polar bears from southern Greenland – a space where sea ice can fade for eight months of the 300 and sixty five days. These bears adopted a brand recent feeding solution to lead trip of starvation: feeding from freshwater ice coming from Greenland’s glaciers.
“We knew there were some bears within the gap from historical records and Indigenous knowledge. We appropriate didn’t know the device special they were,” says Kristin Laidre in an announcement, a polar scientist on the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
Polar bears most incessantly ambush seals on floating layers of sea ice to feed. They feed heaps within the spring and early summer season when vulnerable baby seals wean from their moms, but once the ice melts, they have to immediate unless it returns. Fasting polar bears can continue to exist for as much as three to six months, but attributable to local weather change, the time between feeding alternatives is exceeding that threshold.
To survey the polar bears, the team worked with hunters to settle out where the bears lived. They tagged them and tracked their motion the insist of satellites, and sampled DNA from the hunters’ pick.
By comparing the motion and genetic files to 30 years of historical files from northerly polar acquire populations, the researchers found that the southern inhabitants in Greenland was once behaviorally and genetically trip from