Polar bear trackers help keep people and bears apart
Lead researcher Tyler Ross, a PhD candidate from York University in Toronto, said the fur tags were “particularly promising” for the prevention of these “human-bear interactions”.
In communities in the southern Canadian Arctic, where the scientists tested these tags, polar bears that wander too close to a community are sometimes caught, transported and released in carefully selected sites 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 researcher, who studies polar bear ecology, also says the tags could fill important gaps in knowledge about the bears. And as the Arctic climate warms up rapidly, the need to monitor bears becomes increasingly urgent.
