Arctic foxes living close to the coastline often feed on mercury-contaminated prey

May 7, 2013 06:48 GMT  ·  By

Arctic foxes are already affected by climate change and global warming. According to a study recently published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, mercury pollution also threatens the survival of these animals.

The specialists who took the time to investigate this issue explain that mercury travels fairly easily across the food chain.

Thus, arctic foxes living close to the coastline often feed on mercury-contaminated animals (i.e. seal and sea birds). This ultimately leads to an accumulation of mercury in their bodies.

As the researchers explain, this build-up of mercury in the Arctic foxes’ bodies can sometimes reach dangerous levels.

Science Daily informs us that the researchers reached these conclusions following their looking into the overall health of three different Arctic foxes populations.

Some of these animals lived on the Russian Commander Island of Madnyi and fed almost entirely on sea birds. Others inhabited the same region and were known to snack on seal carcasses every once in a while.

The third population of Arctic foxes taken into consideration for this research lived in inland Iceland, and solely ate local birds and rodents.

Although the hair of all these animals was found to contain traces of mercury, the highest concentrations were pinned down amongst the Arctic foxes inhabiting coastal regions.

“When going into this project we thought that an introduced pathogen would explain the poor condition of the foxes and their high mortality but after extensive screening, we did not find anything,” principal investigator Alex Greenwood stated.

“If pathogens were not the cause, we thought perhaps pollutants could be involved. We thought of mercury because it has been reported in high concentration in other Arctic vertebrates also in remote areas and mercury intoxication is known to increase mortality in mammals,” said researcher further argued.

Given their findings, the researchers urge that high officials do their best to better control mercury pollution.