As climate change reshapes Arctic food webs, ringed seals will swim into risky polar bear territory if the menu is varied enough.
As climate change reshapes Arctic food webs, ringed seals will swim into risky polar bear territory if the menu is varied enough.
That’s the central finding of a new study published in Ecology Letters. UBC researchers tracked 26 ringed seals and 39 polar bears in eastern Hudson Bay, using GPS and dive information to analyze how the animals found, and avoided becoming, food.
“Climate change is reshaping the Arctic, an area often seen as a foreshadowing of climate changes around the world,” said lead author Dr. Katie Florko, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). “It’s not just melting sea ice: climate change is affecting everything: the predators, the prey and their habitats, effectively reshuffling a complex, intertwined system. If we map critical habitat while ignoring how bears and seals interact, we risk potentially protecting areas that animals are actually avoiding in a climate-changed future.”
Read more at: University of British Columbia
A ringed seal in the ocean. (Photo Credit: Dr. Marie Auger-Methe)
