According to a research study conducted by Seth Cherry and colleagues, the number of polar bears that are undernourished in the Arctic has tripled of the last 20 years.  Cherry and others, based out of the University of Alberta in Canada, have been monitoring the health of the bears in the Beaufort Sea area of the Arctic.

During April and May of 1985, 1986, 2005 and 2006 Cherry and his team used tranquilizer darts in order to immobilize the bear in order to measure the ratio of urea to creatine in their bloodstream.  When an animal is fasting this ratio will be low, something that is normally only seen in male polar bears during the spring mating season.  During the 1985 and 1986 studies showed the number of bears fasting was 9.6 and 10.5.  In 2005 and 2006 this number had reached 21.4 and 29.3 percent, respectively.

The plight of the polar bear is a well known and well argued topic. On May 14 of 2008, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Interior, made the decision to list polar bears as a threatened species according to the Endangered Species Act. And in August of this past year Alaska’s Governor, Sarah Palin, sued the federal government in an attempt to put an end to the listing of the polar bear as threatened.  She charged that the administration was too accepting of studies that she felt were overstating the issue of the polar bears’ survival and she also claimed that listing the polar bears as threatened would be detrimental to Alaska and its pipeline and off shore drilling ventures.

This increase is undernourished polar bears is being directly linked to the warmer temperatures and melting of the arctic shelf, which is making it harder for the bears to hunt.  Also, with less ice surface for the seals to mate and, more importantly, to birth, there is less prey for the polar bears to hunt.

This latest study is only highlighting what is already known: warmer Arctic temperatures and the melting ice may very well be the death of the polar bear.