Using data from 900 bear captures carried out at varying points between 1984 and 2009, researchers found the average weight of males had dropped by 45kg (99lb) and females by 31kg.
To see just what kind of impact this has on bears, Cattet, Powell, and colleagues reviewed their combined data from 32 years of bear capture--analyzing blood samples from a total of 340 black and grizzly bears.
The female bear captured the pictures on a special camera attached to her collar, as part of a study to find out how the threatened species is responding to sea-ice loss.
But "it's not a clear-cut situation," Ms. Miller said, noting that most bears captured this spring on the ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas have been in good condition.
Admiral Nelson's encounter as a plucky 14-year-old midshipman fighting only with the butt of his musket is surely a myth, but others are true.Young bears, captured as they swam after the bodies of their newly killed mothers, were caught and sent to zoos and circuses.
Starting in the 1980s, researchers collected tissue or hair samples from nearly 3000 polar bears captured by scientists or killed by hunters throughout the Arctic.
The team also found that bears captured multiple times lost body fat or did not gain body fat at the normal rate.
Bears captured multiple times were in lower body condition than bears captured only once.
Blood samples from bears captured during spring (April-May) were included in a previous study [ 16].
This substitution was found to be fixed in a larger set of 25 polar bears from across their range, including bears captured in Alaska and Svalbard, Norway.
Individual bears captured up to 700 salmon over a 40 day salmon spawning period at Bag Harbour, most of which were carried into the riparian zone and only partially consumed [ 30].
