Two polar bears at the Oregon Zoo may be the key to understanding how climate change is affecting the wild species found in the Artic.
According to OPB.org, a polar bear named Tasul has been trained to wear an accelerometer on a collar. The instrument tracks her movements while she's walking, eating, sleeping and swimming.
Anthony Pagano, a wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center, videotapes Tasul while she is wearing the collar, and the footage will be compared with the electronic signals in the accelerometer.
The same device is attached to 10 wild polar bears in the Arctic.
"With climate change they're now moving expansive distances far from the coast to follow the receding pack ice where nobody is able to observe them," Pagano told OPB.org. "We don't have any data as to whether they're able to forage over these habitats."
The goal of the study is to see how the amount of pack ice available to wild polar bears is changing their habits, like how much they walk, forage and feed.
"My project is looking at how much time are they able to spend foraging over these habitats as climate change is coming into effect, and what impact might that have on polar bears energetically," Pagano told OPB.org.
Conrad, another polar bear at the zoo, is aiding a different climate change study in which researchers are trying to create a new method of measuring polar bear diet through blood and hair samples.
Karyn Rode, research wildlife biologist with the USGS in Alaska, is focused on the sea ice's affect on polar bears' diet, which can affect their health and ability to reproduce.
"Currently we have limited tools to know what polar bears in the wild are eating and how much they're eating," she said. "If this new technique works, we'll be able to look back at 30 years of hair and blood samples we've collected and determine what the diets of those bears were and how it might have changed with changing sea ice conditions."
