Hungry bears devastating seabird nesting colonies
CBC News Posted: Feb 07, 2014 3:22 PM ET Last Updated: Feb 10, 2014 10:47 AM ET
Shrinking Arctic sea ice has left polar bears scrambling to find food, and they’ve taken to eggs in a big way, unfortunately for the birds.
While some athletes may impress us by downing a mere dozen eggs for breakfast, a polar bear in the Northern Hudson Bay region can eat hundreds of seabird eggs in a sitting, report researchers from Carleton University and Environment Canada.
“A bear can essentially devastate all the eggs on an island,” said Samuel Iverson, lead author of the report, in an interview with CBC’s Quirks & Quarks Saturday.
Iverson, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Biology at Carleton University, recalled one rampage he witnessed in which a polar bear ate its way through an eider duck nesting colony with 300 nests, each containing about four or five eggs. The eggs were nearly “completely consumed within about a 48-hour period.”
It’s not just ground-nesting birds such as common eiders that are being targeted, the researchers report in a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
For the full article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-has-polar-bears-on-egg-diet-1.2527740?cmp=rss