Polar bears to humans: Relax, we've got this

With polar bears' icy homes melting due to climate change, scientists worried about mass polar bear starvation -- but a new study suggests the bears' diets may be flexible enough to cope. Polar bears currently rely on sea ice for food foraging, especially for hunting seal pups, so scientists had predicted that polar bears would starve by 2068 when "annual ice breakup is expected to separate the bears from their sea-ice hunting grounds for a consecutive 180 days each year," reports the American Museum of Natural History, "creating ice-free seasons that will last two months longer than those in the 1980s." But those studies failed to account for dietary flexibility, say scientists at the AMNH, in a new paper published in PLOS-ONE. "Polar bears are opportunists," says AMNH researcher Robert Rockwell, that "have been documented consuming various types and combinations of land-based food since the earliest natural history records." Dr. Rockwell and Linda Gormezano focused on terrestrial food sources to determine if they offer enough energy to sustain adult male polar bears during long summer, when they can’t rely on ice-hunting to build up fat reserves. Prey such as caribou, snow geese, and snow goose eggs provide plenty of calories, they calculated, well more than the bears burn in hunting them...more