When a polar bear kills, he doesn’t just eat. It nourishes the entire ecosystem

When a polar bear kills its prey, it is not the only one who gets the bloody benefits.

Many of nature’s apex predators scavenge their dinner until they’ve eaten every last morsel and licked the bones clean. But scientists say Polar seals eat only what they need, and leave the rest for other Arctic creatures to eat.

A new study, Oikos magazine publishedIt is estimated that a polar bear provides about 300 kilograms of meat per year for other animals to eat. With 26,000 polar bears in the Arctic, this is 7.6 million kilograms of food annually.

“If we lose polar bears from the Arctic … there’s no replacement,” said Holly Gamblin, a wildlife biologist at the University of Manitoba. as it happens Host Nil Koksal. “There are no other comparable species that are doing this.”

Sharing is not necessarily caring

By sharing the spoils obtained from hunting, polar bears are providing what is known as an “ecosystem service,” says Gamblin. Lead author of the study. AAnd this is in stark contrast to the behavior of many other apex predators such as mountain lions and wolves.

But she says, the polar bears aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

“I can’t say he has this altruistic nature,” she said. “But they have this obesity specialist diet.”

Polar bears really only want to eat one thing, she says – and that thing is blubber, the thick layer of warm fat under the skin of marine animals like seals and penguins.

“They’re usually isolating him first,” Gamblin said. “They don’t really care that much about the leftover meat. It’s hard for them to digest that protein.”

Geoff York, a polar bear researcher who were not included in this study, SIt seems likely that if polar bears are hungry enough they would even go beyond obesity, but they certainly prefer fatty morsels.

“Just as brown bears along salmon streams become more selective as their weight increases, eating only the eggs of spawning salmon and discarding the carcasses, polar bears in good physical condition also focus on fat obtained from marine mammal hunting,” York, research director of the conservation group Polar Bears International, said in an email.

And one Arctic carnivore’s trash is another’s treasure.

The study, which included scientists from the University of Alberta, confirmed that 11 vertebrate species have been documented scavenging discarded polar bear meat, including wolves, foxes, gulls, hawks, snowy owls and grizzly bears.

The team also identified eight other species as potential scavengers because they have been observed on sea ice, but have not. Polar bears were observed eating leftover meat.

Prominent among the donors are Arctic foxes, which have been known to follow polar bear tracks on the sea ice in the hope of snatching a few pieces of meat.

“Arctic foxes are considered polar bears’ best friends,” Gamblin said. “So polar bears are killing and getting fatter that can really impact the Arctic fox population from year to year.”

But the polar bear population is declining rapidly.

A study last year estimated that Polar bears could disappear completely from Hudson Bay Melting of sea ice due to climate change over the next few decades.

Gamblin and his colleagues noted that polar bear populations declined by 32 percent in western Hudson Bay between 1987 and 2011, and by 44 percent in the southern Beaufort Sea between 2004 and 2016.

The study’s authors say these losses amount to 323,000 kilograms of lost food resources for other Arctic animals alone.

York says this is just another reason it’s important to protect polar bears.

“The potential loss of apex predators is not about the loss of a single species, but about the loss of a key player in the ecosystem that will have a domino effect throughout the Arctic,” he said.