Climate change is changing the diet of polar bears. We had already told just a few months ago how polar bears are increasingly forced to go to the mainland due to the loss of sea ice. Here they look for food such as berries, birds and eggs. Now, for the first time ever, Arctic polar bears have been seen feasting on dolphin meat.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Climate change is changing the diet of polar bears. We had already told just a few months ago how polar bears are increasingly forced to go to the mainland due to the loss of sea ice. Here they look for food such as berries, birds and eggs. Now, for the first time ever, Arctic polar bears have been seen feasting on dolphin meat.
The strange behavior was first observed by researchers in 2014 on a small fjord in Norway, according to a new study published in Polar Research. Since then, six different bears have been sighted eat the dolphins in that zone.
The sighting involves an adult male polar bear that preyed on two white-beaked Lagenorinco dolphins (Lagenorhynchus albirostris) on 23 April 2014. I white-beaked dolphins they are frequent visitors to the waters of the Svalbard area in the summer, but have not previously been reported this far north in the spring.
“We suggest that they remainyou get trapped in the ice after the strong northerly winds of the previous days, and were probably killed when forced up to the surface to breathe in a small opening in the ice, ”explain the researchers in the abstract.
The bear, described by the authors with "Ribs clearly visible" and "very thin", consumed most of the parts of a dolphin. Then she started covering the second dolphin mostly intact in the snow. Such behavior is generally considered atypical for polar bears. It could be the result of the now constant shortage of food due to the ice melting.
During the following summer, once the winter ice melted, at least seven different carcasses of white-beaked dolphins were found in the same area. Considering the area and time when these dolphins died, it is assumed that they all belonged to the same pod and that they were all trapped in the ice in April. At least six different polar bears have been seen eating their carcasses.
Roberta Ragni
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