![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The wide paws prevent sea ice from breaking by distributing the polar bear's weight as it walks. Polar bears have strong legs and large, flattened feet with some webbing between their toes, which helps with swimming and walking on ice. The polar bear's footpads have a kind of “non-slip” surface, allowing them to get traction on slippery ice. The bear's large size reduces the amount of surface area that's exposed to the cold per unit of body mass (pounds of flesh), which generates heat. This is especially important while swimming and during the frigid Arctic winter. Polar bears also have a thick layer of fat below the surface of the skin, which acts as insulation on the body to trap heat. ![]() The skin under the polar bear's fur is actually black this black is evident only on the nose. The bear's outer layer of fur is hollow and reflects light, giving the fur a white color that helps the bear remain camouflaged. Many of the polar bear's physical adaptations help it maintain body heat and deal with its icy habitat. A newborn polar bear weighs only about 1.5 pounds. Bears can weigh about 50 percent more after a successful hunting season than they do at the start of the next most of this additional weight is accumulated fat. A large male can weigh more than 1,700 pounds, while a large female is about half that size (up to 1,000 pounds). Male polar bears are much larger than the females. They are about seven to eight feet long, measured from the nose to the tip of their very short tail. 28, 2023.Polar bears are the largest carnivorous land mammals on Earth. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. "We pretty much will be able to see that in all environments." "I don't think it's a special feature of the coastal environment," he said. He noted that though the study focused on an area in the Arctic, starfish are found worldwide, so it is likely that "there is the same structure or the same food web everywhere on the sea floor." The Southampton Island region has been identified as an area of interest for Marine Protected Area designation by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.Īmiraux said food webs provide insight into ecosystem functioning. The researchers examined 1,580 samples from wildlife around Nunavut's Southampton Island in Hudson Bay to understand how the ecosystem functions and help governing bodies protect and conserve marine life in the area. "Actually, when a polar bear dies, it can be eaten by carnivore seastars," Amiraux said. The study's authors say "megafaunal-predatory" Pterasteridae seastars thrive in this realm "because of their evolved defence mechanism associated with a diet of other predators, including marine mammal carcasses that settle onto the ocean floor."Īmiraux said that while polar bears do not consume starfish, "the opposite is quite true." So it's way more complex than what we thought," Amiraux said. "You have a whole food web, including primary predators, herbivores and many carnivores. He said that invertebrates, or creatures without backbones, living in sediment on the Arctic sea floor did not just consist of plant-eating herbivores. "It’s a shift in our view of how the coastal Arctic marine food web works," Amiraux said in an interview. Seastars within the Pterasteridae family sat at the top, with the study dubbing them "the benthic equivalent to polar bears." The voracious carnivores are seastars, better known as starfish, and a new study by a national research group says they tie with polar bears as the top predators of the Arctic marine ecosystem.Ĭo-author Remi Amiraux, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba, said sea floor, or benthic, organisms are not commonly studied because they are often assumed to be lower on the food chain.īut the study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the ocean floor includes organisms across the whole range of the food chain. On the Arctic sea floor lie hungry predators that can eat dead polar bears. ![]()
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