The camera on the necks of polar bears captured the battle for life in the Arctic
Scientists hung on the neck of those white collars with cameras and geotracker and collected unique data about how the largest predators on Earth hunt, looking for prey, and how often do not find it.
Biologist Anthony Pagano (Anthony Pagano) three years of watching polar bears on the coast of the Beaufort sea (North of Alaska and Canada). Every year, Pagano and his colleagues put the bears (all they had to work with nine animals), take their blood samples, hung on the neck camera and GPS-tracker and go for a few days. Then again, animals are euthanized, removed the collar, once the blood is taken and weighed.
Pagano was most interested in how bears eat and how long do without food, how often they attempted to kill seals and what percentage of these attempts ends in success for the bear. A blood test taken to get an idea of the speed of metabolism.
Five of the nine females during the observation lost weight, three gained; some had to lose or gain up to 10% of body weight for 7-10 days. Weight lost those bears that spend time on land, and recruited those who managed to find the ice, and the hole seals.
The Arctic ice is melting and bears are becoming harder to find fatty and high-calorie food that allows them to maintain body mass of seals, writes Pagano in an article published in Science. Bears catch seals on the ice, on land they come across smaller animals with less subcutaneous fat than the seals, so the less ice, the bears have fewer opportunities to feed themselves.
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