It is these fat samples, dating back to around 2010, that Galicia and her team looked at for their findings.Īccording to Galicia, you can find around 70 different types of fatty acids-like Omega 3s and 6s-in marine ecosystems. Over the years, the Inuit hunters have been sending muscle and fat samples to York University. In Nunavut, one of Canada’s northern territories, Inuit people are allowed to hunt polar bears. You’re getting an ecosystem that is changing rapidly, and all of the species within that ecosystem also need to adapt.” What’s cookin’? Temperatures are warming faster,” Melissa Galicia, a PhD candidate in York University’s department of biology and one of the authors of the paper, told Ars. “The ice is declining. It is changing at a very rapid pace, especially in comparison to really any other region of the world. The research also suggests that studying fat tissue from polar bears-a practice that can shed light on what prey they’ve been consuming-can be a useful tool in monitoring how species distribution in the Arctic is changing as temperatures increase and ice melts. Because of that warming, some organisms are adapting by shifting their natural stomping grounds, and the region is seeing some species move in as they follow the warmth north and stick around there for longer.Īs such, the menu for polar bears is changing, according to a recently published paper. The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the world. “It is important to understand how polar bear hunting success will be affected by these changing conditions.Paul Souders / Getty Images reader comments 33 with “Wind speeds in the Arctic are projected to increase, potentially making olfaction more difficult,” explained Togunov. Like most studies done in the Arctic these days, the findings also gave scientists pause about the implications of climate change on these polar bears. “Crosswind search was most frequent when winds were slow, when it is easier to localize the source of a certain smell, and at night when bears are relatively active and when vision is less effective, so bears rely more heavily on their sense of smell,” explains University of Alberta professor Andrew Derocher. The researchers found that the best conditions for this type of hunting usually occur at night in the Arctic winter.
But they were left wondering what a polar bear might do before it even catches on to a smell.Īs Togunov explains, “Travelling crosswind gives the bears a steady supply of new air streams and maximizes the area they can sense through smell.” This behavior was suspected in many animals, but this is the first time scientists have been able to quantify it in mammals. Before beginning the study, the researchers had hypothesized that when a bear smells prey, it moves up-wind to find it. “Predators search for prey using odors in the air, and their success depends on how they move relative to the wind,” says Ron Togunov, University of Alberta alumnus and lead author on the study. They then combined the movements of these polar bears with wind patterns in order to see how the two matched up. The researchers attained satellite telemetry data collected from more than 120 adult polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay over an 11-year period. Although that “discovery” may seem rather obvious, it goes a little deeper than that.
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