Hungry Polar Bears Turning To Seabird Eggs as Climate Change Shrinks Their Hunting Ground
In another bleak reminder of the persistent risk posed by rising temperature, a new research has highlighted how hungry polar bears are increasingly foraging on seabird eggs as the crisis shrinks their Arctic hunting grounds.
Climate change is real and there is no other way to look at it. While COVID-19 has held the world by a thread, at the same time, the climate crisis ¡ª while it has taken a backseat in the face of the health crisis ¡ª continues to be a threat.
In another bleak reminder of the persistent risk posed by climate change, a new research has highlighted how hungry polar bears are increasingly foraging on seabird eggs as the crisis shrinks their Arctic hunting grounds.
AP
The phenomenon highlights the struggle these apex predators have to adapt to their rapidly changing environment.
The climate change threat to polar bears is well known, driven by the extraordinary pace of change in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole.
As rising temperatures lead to dwindling sea ice, the polar bears are being forced to cut short the time they have to hunt seals, their preferred prey.
With a growing need to find alternative sustenance, polar bears have been pushed further afield in search of food, including scavenging in areas populated by humans.
Reuters
In such circumstances, the bears are being compelled to come ashore at the same time seabirds are nesting and are snacking on their eggs.
To measure how efficient these top-of-the-food-chain predators were at this foraging -- and therefore how useful the eggs are to provide energy in their diets -- researchers in Canada used drones to monitor them feeding from common eider duck nests on Mitivik Island, in Nunavut.
The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, tracked how the bears approached the nesting site over a period of 11 days, as the number of eggs were depleted.
"We found that later-arriving bears increasingly visited more empty nests and did not travel in an energy-minimizing way, but became less picky in the clutches they consumed," said lead author Patrick Jagielski, of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor.
Also read: Heartbreaking: Polar Bear Cubs Pictured Playing With Plastic On Remote Arctic Island
Reuters
Bears also did not consistently realise that the sudden appearance of a fleeing eider hen meant eggs were nearby.
"This study demonstrates that, while species are able to incorporate 'less preferred' resources into their diet when their primary prey becomes more difficult to obtain, they may not be able to do so efficiently," the authors said.
Jagielski told AFP that the research could not speak more broadly to polar bears' ability to cope with climate change, but did raise questions about the energy value of eggs as an alternative food source.
Also read: Polar Bears Could Go Extinct Very Soon, If Global Warming Isn't Stopped
