Waits, who has studied Galapagos bats, red pandas in Nepal and bears of the Andes, showed at her presentation that about half of those polar-bear track samples yielded viable nuclear DNA. (Photo by Craig George)įor the past several years, a team led by Andy Von Duyke of the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management in Utqiaġvik that includes biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has experimented with using sterilized trowels to scrape a thin layer of snow from fresh polar bear footprints. Wildlife technician Pete Detwiler of the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management samples polar bear tracks north of Utqiaġvik in April 2021 for a project to identify bears by the DNA left behind in their footprints. More time on land may subject polar bears to more competition for food from brown bears and other animals. “With less sea ice, the bears have to spend more time on land,” Waits said. Scientists want to know more about the numbers of these iconic carnivores, which are coping with a warming climate that is greatly affecting their ephemeral hunting grounds. Scientists have identified two populations of polar bears in Alaska: a Chukchi Sea group that also expands to Russia, and Beaufort Sea animals that extend into northern Canada. Polar bears of the northern sea ice number from about 20,000 to 30,000 animals, with the waters and shorelines of northern and western Alaska supporting an unknown number. Polar bears use sea ice as a platform for hunting ringed seals, the fatty staple of their diets. Scientists want to find out more about an animal dependent on northern sea ice, a substance that has been steadily decreasing for as long as we’ve had a good look at it. That broth includes some cells that have allowed scientists to get a DNA fingerprint of a particular polar bear. In her genetics lab in Moscow, Idaho, Waits and her colleagues have processed melted snow skimmed from polar bear tracks in Utqiaġvik, Wainwright and Kaktovik. Lisette Waits of the University of Idaho was in Fairbanks recently at a conference to talk about a wildlife-sampling method that does not include a helicopter, dart gun or handling of a drugged polar bear that can weigh as much as four NFL linemen. That helps them learn more about the farthest-north bears without bothering them or taking extreme risks in the name of science. From the DNA within those cells, scientists have been able to identify individual polar bears. That snow contains tiny flecks of the massive creatures - mostly cells shed from their foot pads. Scientists in northern Alaska are learning about polar bears by scraping snow samples from the tracks they leave behind. Polar bears hunt on the sea ice north of Utqiaġvik, the farthest-north community in the United States.
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