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realDonaldTrump writes:

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.

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