As the Arctic warms many marine mammal species will become vulnerable to human activity
In the past, I have shared with you a story on how the warming Antarctic could impact the king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus). Now, we will have look at how the warming Arctic is shaping up to affect several of the animal populations that live there thanks a to a new study that analysed the vulnerability of Arctic marine mammals as the northern ice sheet(s) retreat.
It is expected that by 2040 the Arctic ice shelf will disappear completely during summer (and, of course, be a fraction of its 20th Century average during winter). For corporations, this is great news: not only will new oil drilling sites become available, other types of exploitation (such as fishing) will also see accessibility to bigger areas and longer seasons. Sadly, increased human activity will severely impact the local ecosystem, on top of whatever havoc climate change itself may directly bring. It's known that the big marine mammals can be stressed out by noise, struck by vessel traffic, or simply have their daily activities disrupted.
For the present study researchers focused on 80 populations from 7 different species: beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas), narwhals (Monodon monoceros), bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), ringed seals (Pusa hispida), bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus), walruses (Odobenus rosmarus), and polar bears (Urus maritimus), in order to calculate scores of vulnerability based on each species habitat, habits and known susceptibilities to passing ships.
Narwhals were found to be the most vulnerable species to increased human activity with a score of 5.59. Not too surprising as it has been recently reported that Narwhals have an unusually extreme stress response. On the other hand, polar bears and seals had the lowest vulnerability scores, likely because they spend most of their time on land. It is interesting to note that most of the species analysed are not yet considered to be threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature except for the polar bear and the walrus, I wonder how long until they all join the same 'threatened' status.
Mean vulnerability assessment during open water season:
| Species | ||
|---|---|---|
| Narwhal | ||
| Walrus | ||
| Bowhead | ||
| Beluga | ||
| Bearded seal | ||
| Ringed seal | ||
| Polar bear | ||
| All |
Adapted from https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803543115
The scientists note that the study is only the beginning. More data is needed to understand how each species will be affected and how the inter-specific, intra-specific and environmental interactions will affect the ecosystem as a whole. They hope to eventually lay out the least disruptive routes and perhaps find other recommendations to reduce anthropogenic damage.
Original article:
Further reading:
"Narwhals, walruses are most at risk from booming Arctic ship traffic" at Science News.
"Melting sea ice is stressing out narwhals" at Science News.
"When will the summer Arctic be nearly sea ice free?" at Geophysical Research Letters.
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Thanks for the post, tychoxi.
I hope you don't mind if I test out some sentiment analysis on your post. This is an experimental bot running on posts that have exceptional positivity or negativity. The goal is to iterate towards a bot that gives content creators and curators actionable and useful information.
Your post was selected because it is in the 99th percentile for negativity.Your post had an average negative sentiment of -0.095, an average positive sentiment of 0.042, and an average normalized sentiment of -0.05
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In the past, I have shared with you a story on [how the warming Antarctic would impact the king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)."
The most negative sentence in your post had a normalized negativity score of -0.277:
"Sadly, increased human activity will severely impact the local ecosystem, on top of whatever havoc climate change itself may directly bring."
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