New tech aims to keep polar bears away from people
As the Canadian Arctic summer draws to an end, polar bears are expected to head inland as they await for the ice to form. Thousands of tourists flock to catch a glimpse of the animals, causing researchers to develop novel ways to keep people and bears safely apart.
New tracking devices stuck onto the bears’ fur could be crucial to protecting both people and polar bears, allowing their locations to be closely monitored. Polar bears spend more of the year on land once the Arctic sea ice melts.
Conservationists as a result are more and more concerned about the animals coming into contact with humans, causing danger to both people and the bears. The tracking tags were tested on bears in Canada and could help prevent these encounters as they allow researchers and rangers to keep “a remote eye” on them.
The fur tags were said to be “particularly promising” in preventing these “human-bear interactions” according to lead researcher Tyler Ross, a PhD candidate from York University in Toronto. In communities in the southern Canadian Arctic where these tags were tested, polar bears that wandered too closely to a community are sometimes caught, transported, and released in sites carefully selected and far away from towns and villages.
“These tags could be fitted to those bears to monitor where they are after they’ve been released,” explained Mr Ross. “If they’re coming back towards the community, conservation staff would have a sense of where they are, and they could head them off. I think that’s where they offer considerable promise.”
The team which studies polar bear ecology also says that the tags could fill important gaps in our knowledge about the animals. With the Arctic climate rapidly warming up, there is an increasingly urgent need to closely monito the animals.
