14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, green group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced that a team of researchers was getting ready to go spying on polar bears in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. More precisely, scientists were to travel to this region and fit several females belonging to this species with collars.
Recent news on the topic says that the expedition organized by WWF-Canon and the Norwegian Polar Institute came to an end this past April 21, and that the folks who took part in it are quite pleased with its outcome.
Live Science informs that, according to Geoff York, one of the expedition leaders, the team fitted as many as 11 female polar bears with satellite tracking collars as of April 17. These animals' movements will from now on be closely monitored.
As previously reported, the end goal of this initiative is to try and determine how polar bears are responding to changes in their natural habitat. Thus, specialists are interested in learning how rising temperatures and melting sea ice are affecting this species.
Should things go according to plan, information obtained by means of the satellite tracking collars the female polar bears were fitted with will make it possible for researchers to establish how new environmental conditions are influencing both the animals' movements and their denning patterns.
Information shared with the public says that the collars used in this research project sport sensors which enable them to record temperature, daylight, exposure to sunlight, and depth. Hence, they are a valuable tool when it comes to figuring out how much time the animals spend in their dens or hunting.
As previously reported, there is evidence to suggest that, as a result of rising temperatures and melting sea ice, this species has been forced to shift its denning habitats further north. It is likely that this has happened because polar bears rely heavily on sea ice in order to hunt and feed their offspring.
“We don’t know what the future holds for these bears. We do know that bear populations deprived of sea ice for significant amounts of time are less likely to survive or breed successfully,” specialist Geoff York, WWF lead on polar bears, said in a recent statement.
“We want to see how polar bears use an area that is encountering such rapid change because of melting and shifting sea ice,” added Gert Polet, an Arctic expert with WWF-Netherlands.
In order to fit the female polar bears with satellite tracking collars, the animals must first be tracked down by crew aboard a helicopter. The polar bears are then sedated with the help of darts. Apart from putting collars around the bears' neck, researchers weigh them, measure how long they are, and even collect hair and blood samples.