No Basis For Hope That Polar Bear Metabolism Could Help Survival During Starvation Summers

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Polar bears are in an incredibly precarious position. Their Arctic habitat is warming at twice the rate of lower latitudes, and the sea ice onto which they venture, during the winter, to hunt for seals is disappearing before our eyes.

But nature is resilient, and the hope, harbored by some, was that the polar bears could sleep away the problem: that as they’re forced to spend increasing long summers on land, where food is scare, they enter a state of “walking hibernation.” Researchers have proposed that this special power would allow the bears to save energy, and thus avoid starvation, while they wait for their hunting ground to freeze back over.

Unfortunately, a new study concludes, polar bears possess no such ability after all.

A team of researchers, led by University of Wyoming polar bear economist John Whiteman, tagged a small population of polar bears living in the vicinity of the Beaufort Sea and tracked their activity and body temperatures during an Arctic summer. They learned a lot — because it’s so hard to obtain, Whiteman told the New York Times, data on polar bear physiology never before existed. But one insight stood out: the bears’ body temperatures sort of dropped during the summer, but not nearly enough to put them in a state in which they would require less food. The theory that they have some sort of secret resistance to starvation has been effectively debunked.

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“The take home message corroborates past findings,” study co-author Steven C. Amstrup, the chief scientist at Polar Bears International, said in a statement. “There is a limit to how long polar bears can persist as sea ice continues to decline. They have no special metabolic ability to prolong that time frame, and if we want polar bears in our future, we need to stop sea ice decline.”

EDIT/END

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/16/bad_news_for_polar_bears_why_the_endangered_species_may_not_be_able_to_adapt_to_a_warming_arctic_after_all/

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