Polar Bears May Be Left Starving as Melting Sea Ice Forces Them onto Land
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – New research has found that polar bears will struggle to adapt to a land-based diet, as diminishing sea ice puts them at risk of starvation.
The Alaskan study found that food sources on the land such as berries and caribou are not enough to support the largest of the bear species.
"What we found was that because polar bears are really large — they're the largest bear species — they are large because they have a really high fat diet out of the sea ice," the report author Karyn Rode said.
"The food resources in land environments are, especially arctic coastal environments where they come on shore, are poor quality and in low abundance and so the conclusion that we drew with that and with a variety of other sort of lines of information was that it's unlikely that foods on land can meaningfully replace what bears are losing out on the sea ice in terms of food resources."
Dr. Ian Stirling, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta and a member of Scientific Advisory Council at Polar Bears International, has studied the animal for 45 years.
Dr. Stirling says seals are the main food source for polar bears and agrees there are no adequate food substitutes on land.
"The bears, they're kind of in the worst situation in an evolutionary sense. They're large mammals and they're very highly specialised to very specific ecological requirements," he said.
"I mean, if the ecology changes, especially if it happens quickly, there's just simply no time for the bears to even try and adapt. Polar bears feed on seals but they need a platform to hunt them from.
"They can't go out and swim in the open water and catch them so they need that ice and that's why the ice is critical."
Dr. Stirling says climate change is diminishing sea ice, which polar bears depend on to hunt seals.
He says he fears some polar bears are at risk of starvation.
"We've had some very thin bears in Western Hudson Bay and up in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway, the whole area of western Svalbard is seeing virtually no ice in the winter time recently and we're seeing some bears that look like they might be starving."
