© Patricia RockwellMay switch to eggs: sub-adult male polar bear near Churhchill, Manitoba, Canada.
As polar bears adapt to a warming Arctic - a frozen seascape that cleaves earlier each spring - they may find relief in an unlikely source: snow goose eggs. New calculations show that changes in the timing of sea-ice breakup and of snow goose nesting near the western Hudson Bay could provide at least some polar bears with an alternative source of food. This new analysis appears in
Polar Biology.
"Over 40 years, six subadult male bears were seen among snow goose nests, and four of them were sighted after the year 2000," says Robert Rockwell, a research associate in Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History and a Professor of Biology at City College at City University of New York. "I've seen a subadult male eat eider duck eggs whole or press its nose against the shell, break it, and eat the contents. This is similar to a different research group's observations of polar bears eating Barnacle Goose eggs on Svalbard, an island near Norway."
Polar bears, Ursus maritimus, are listed as a threatened species under the United States' Endangered Species Act and are classified as "vulnerable with declining populations" under IUCN's Red List. Polar bears' habitat rings the Arctic south of 88˚ latitude. Most of this area is sea ice from which bears hunt seals, although the breakup of sea ice over the summer forces some bears to move north, to pack ice, or onto land. More often, it is subadult males that are pushed to these less ideal conditions, where they live, in part, off stored fat reserves.
Comment: The author Alan Caruba seems to be spot on regarding the nonsense of human caused global warming and the fact that it seems highly likely that global cooling is what the future holds. Indeed unusual weather seems to be popping up all over, record cold, record snow fall. Where the author misses the mark is in the last two paragraphs.
The global warming hoax affects everyone. It is not an operation designed to wreck the economies of the United States and other western nations. People of developing nations starve and freeze just like everyone else. The simplest explanation is often the correct one. The global warming hoax is perpetuated to hide the truth. The simple truth that global cooling is on the horizon and it is not in the realm of mankind's power to change it.