Monday, December 12, 2016

Arctic reindeer is another victim of global warming - they are getting smaller


Reindeer on an Arctic island near the North Pole is becoming smaller in size and it is attributed to a side-effect of climate change that has reduced winter food for the animals. The island is Svalbard, a chain of islands north of Norway.
The average weight of an adult reindeer has fallen to 48kg from 55kg in the 1990s and, in the opinion of experts, is a part of sweeping changes to Arctic life as temperatures rise.
This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 12 December 2016.
The study was carried out at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland with Norwegian researchers who concluded that while warmer summers are great for reindeer, the winters are getting increasingly tough. The reason is that less chilly winters mean that once-reliable snows fall more often as rain that can freeze into a sheet of ice. This makes it harder for the herbivores to reach plant food.
Ultimately, some of them starve and females often give birth to stunted young.
In summer, however, plants flourish in a food bonanza that ensures healthy females more likely to conceive in autumn - a pregnancy lasts about seven months.
The wild herd studied at Svalbard, located about 1300-Km from the North Pole, had increased to about 1400 animals from 800 since the 1990s. This rise in population The means more competition for scarce food in winter. Arctic temperatures are rising faster than the world average due to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org
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