Polar bears adapt to warmer climate

Polar bears are “adapting to a warmer Arctic faster than expected. New research from the University of East Anglia found that polar bears in southeastern Greenland show shifts in gene activity linked to heat stress, metabolism, and ageing as temperatures rise, hinting at early genetic responses to climate change,” reports The Doomslayer.

The University of East Anglia explains:

New research reveals a link between rising temperatures and changes in polar bear DNA, which may be helping them adapt and survive in increasingly challenging environments.

The study by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) discovered that some genes related to heat-stress, aging and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in southeastern Greenland, suggesting they might be adjusting to their warmer conditions.

The finding suggests that these genes play a key role in how different polar bear populations are adapting or evolving in response to their changing local climates and diets…

This study is thought to be the first time a statistically significant link has been found between rising temperatures and changing DNA in a wild mammal species.

Changes were also found in gene expression areas of DNA linked to fat processing, which is important when food is scarce and could mean the southeastern bears are slowly adapting to the rougher plant-based diets that can be found in the warmer regions, compared to the mainly fatty, seal-based diets of the northern populations.

In 2019, a Liberty Unyielding blogger noted that

Polar bear populations are booming. That’s interesting, because it is at odds with what many people think. In my neighborhood, children posted fliers in a park about how global warming was supposedly killing off the polar bears. They were apparently told this by their teachers. Some government officials used to cite a dwindling number of polar bears as being the result of climate change.

But there are more polar bears now than there were a generation ago. As John Hinderaker points out, “polar bears are thriving.” As retired meteorologist Anthony Watts notes, “Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s. In The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, a book published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr. Susan Crockford uses the latest data … and concludes that polar bears are actually thriving.”

Crockford noted, “My scientific estimates make perfect sense and they tally with what the Inuit and other Arctic residents are seeing on the ground. Almost everywhere polar bears come into contact with people, they are much more common than they used to be. It’s a wonderful conservation success story.”