foxnews.com/science/reindeer-eating-seaweed-climate-change
Named after the group of Norwegian islands they've lived on for 5,000 years, these 20,000–plus reindeer are now eating seaweed to survive the increasingly warm winters. According to researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Centre for Biodiversity Dynamic, the reindeer are turning to seaweed because the plants they normally eat are becoming harder to get to.
More rain is now falling instead of snow, which causes the snow on the ground to freeze over [...] burying the tundra vegetation under thick ice.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/nuos-rat042419.php
[...] So they devised a way to figure out if indeed reindeer were eating seaweed, and why.
This involved -- and there is no polite way to say it -- collecting and testing their poop. It turns out that researchers can distinguish between different kinds of food animals eat by testing their hair or their scat for isotopes.
In this case, the researchers collected reindeer poop from animals that were in habitats near the shore as well as from animals that lived in areas far from the shore. They then looked at stable isotope ratios of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur, all of which will have values that are detectably different in scat from reindeer that eat seaweed compared to scat from reindeer with a more traditional diet of terrestrial plants.
The researchers also had nine years of data for ground ice thickness, which they called basal ice. They combined this with GPS collar data, and location data from a total of 2199 reindeer observations during those years. They were then able to calculate where the reindeer were with respect to the coastline, and to see if more reindeer went to the coast to feed in years when the ground ice was thicker.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday May 13 2019, @07:14AM (4 children)
Feeding close to the coast also make the reindeer vulnerable to bears and other predators. Being forced to eat seaweed is not entirely without its drawbacks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @08:25AM (3 children)
All they saw is deer eating seaweed by the beach. The rest is just wild speculation. They could easily have tested their theory by giving the reindeer seaweed to see if they liked it... There is nothing wrong with deer eating seaweed, it is nutritious.
They saw diarreah because it was young calves experiencing a particularly bad winter, which is when more seaweed washes onshore. And they are not often preyed upon by bears:
>"Svalbard reindeer also differ from most other wild ungulates in that they are not subject to significant inter-specific competition or, in our study area, to insect harassment. Neither are they subject to predation: only a handful of killings by polar bear (Ursus maritimus) have been reported"*
And look at this "tend to be more often at the beach" data in figure 1: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2672 [wiley.com]
The correlation is basically nothing.
* https://polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/2609/html [polarresearch.net]
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday May 13 2019, @09:40AM (2 children)
https://www.treehugger.com/animals/reindeer-are-eating-seaweed-cope-climate-change.html [treehugger.com]
https://www.medicaldaily.com/reindeer-eating-seaweeds-434082 [medicaldaily.com]
https://www.sciencealert.com/northern-reindeer-have-started-eating-seaweed-to-survive [hthttps]
https://newatlas.com/reindeer-seaweed-climate-change/59454/ [newatlas.com]
So you might just be wrong. The diarrhea is not just in calves. They are being increasingly predated but not to any significant effect on population size.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @01:43PM
I linked you to the actual papers this is based on. They say seaweed is just as nutritious, and it was mostly calves tasting it.
When winters are "harsh" they mean there was lots of precipitation. Lots of precipitation = lots of storms = lots of seaweed washes on shore = reindeer go to the coast more often to eat more seaweed.
They never check how much seaweed is available each year, or if the deer would prefer seaweed over the other food... And I told you look at their figure 1 regarding the claim they go to the coast more often when the ice is thicker, it is a very weak relstionship to begin with.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @02:48PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=31567&op=Reply&page=1&pid=842932#post_comment [soylentnews.org]
https://polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/2609/html [polarresearch.net]