Reindeer Are Eating Seaweed to Survive Climate Change, Scientists Say

Reindeer prefer seaweed Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:42AM (7 children)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:42AM (#842849)

If you put out a bowl of seaweed and then a bowl of grass the reindeer will eat the seaweed. They are probably loving the opportunity and thinking this is heaven.

Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:54AM

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:54AM (#842855)

Yes, deer love seaweed:
http://www.pestdetective.org.nz/culprits/white-tailed-deer/ [pestdetective.org.nz]
https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-7998.2000.tb00795.x [wiley.com]

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Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @06:25AM

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @06:25AM (#842889)

It's like saying someone who got a raise is now forced to eat steak instead of mcdonalds.

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Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday May 13 2019, @07:14AM (4 children)

by janrinok (52) on Monday May 13 2019, @07:14AM (#842897) Journal

Eating seaweed may provide a few extra calories to the reindeer, but it came at a cost: seaweed eaters had a lot of diarrhea, probably from the salt, Hansen said.
"When conditions are harsh, during bad winters, the reindeer do tend to be more often at the beach, and yes, they eat seaweed, confirming our hypothesis," Hansen said. Although eating seaweed isn't ideal, he said, it does show the animals are able to adapt, which is the good news.
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.

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- Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @08:25AM (3 children)
  
  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @08:25AM (#842911)
  
  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]
  
  Parent
  - Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday May 13 2019, @09:40AM (2 children)
    
    by janrinok (52) on Monday May 13 2019, @09:40AM (#842932) Journal
    
    https://www.treehugger.com/animals/reindeer-are-eating-seaweed-cope-climate-change.html [treehugger.com]
    Hansen said he and his colleagues assumed the reindeer were feeding on seaweed, but, he said, "of course you need more hard-core evidence to show that this was linked to poor conditions, not just coincidence."
    [...]
    So they figured out a way to prove that the creatures were resorting to foraging from the sea, and why. They analyzed scat for isotopes showing the nature of plants being consumed, and combined that with nine years of data for ground ice thickness. According to the University, "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."
    Perhaps it is with little surprise they concluded that indeed, when thick ice prevented access to their preferred food, the reindeer turned to seaweed as a supplementary source of nutrients.
    "When conditions are harsh, during bad winters, the reindeer do tend to be more often at the beach, and yes, they eat seaweed, confirming our hypothesis," Hansen said.
    Although eating seaweed isn't ideal – it causes diarrhea and doesn't supply all of the nutrients they require – it does prove one thing: The animals are able to adapt, which may bode well for them in an increasingly changing climate.
    https://www.medicaldaily.com/reindeer-eating-seaweeds-434082 [medicaldaily.com]
    This caused the team to worry for the future of the reinder. In addition to kelp being not that nutritious, it’s also giving the reindeer diarrhea. There’s also the problem of predators like hungry polar bears that might attack them from the shoreline.
    https://www.sciencealert.com/northern-reindeer-have-started-eating-seaweed-to-survive [hthttps]
    A couple years ago, a study found that the average weight of adult reindeer on Svalbard had fallen from 55kg (121lb) to 48kg (106lb) in the 1990s, mostly as a consequence of global warming and charging Arctic landscapes. That's roughly 20kg less than they should ideally be.
    https://newatlas.com/reindeer-seaweed-climate-change/59454/ [newatlas.com]
    Despite this, the seaweed is taking a toll on the reindeer: diarrhea, which is thought to be caused by the salt content. If there's a silver lining, it may be the reindeer's adaptability in the face of adversity. Not all species are as fortunate.
    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.
    
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    - Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @01:43PM
      
      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @01:43PM (#842998)
      
      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.
      
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    - Re:Reindeer prefer seaweed (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @02:48PM
      
      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @02:48PM (#843020)
      
      The nutritious value of marine biomass (for ungulates) is not well known—and probably not well informed by SIA of whole feces—but appears overall comparable to terrestrial plants. The N content (generally 1–2%) and the in vitro dry matter digestibility (e.g., up to 59% for Laminaria sp.) of seaweed and kelp on the Isle of Rum were close to red deer's terrestrial food plants (Conradt 2000), and relatively high compared with the typical winter forage vascular plants (N content 1–2%, in vitro dry matter digestibility ~30–50%) of reindeer and caribou (Klein 1990). Seaweed (Fucus sp.) consumed by black‐tailed deer was found to represent low to moderate levels of digestible energy, but high levels of protein (Parker et al. 1999).
      https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=31567&op=Reply&page=1&pid=842932#post_comment [soylentnews.org]
      the population survey revealed that 13% of the total reindeer meta-population (Table 1) was feeding on washed-up kelp on the sea-ice foot (Fig. 2b, c). The proportion of kelp feeders during this population “snap-shot” was 0% on Brøggerhalvøya, 12% on Kaffiøyra and 21% on Sarsøyra, which provided the best access to this food source. The demographic composition among kelp feeders (Table 1) differed significantly from the non-kelp feeders (Fisher's exact test: P[less than] 0.01), and the few calves alive at this point in winter were overrepresented.
      [...]
      Likewise, non-anecdotal reports of other large terrestrial herbivores feeding on marine algae are few (Carlton & Hodder 2003) and largely limited to introduced reindeer (R. tarandus) on South Georgia (Leader-Williams et al. 1981) and red deer (Cervus elaphus) on the Isle of Rum (Conradt 2000), which occasionally fed on washed-up seaweed at low tide in winter.
      [...]
      The nutritional value of kelp and seaweed for terrestrial herbivores is largely unknown, but the in vitro digestibility of seaweed in the Isle of Rum system was comparable to terrestrial forage (Conradt 2000), and high mineral contents may possibly also have a significant nutritional value. On the other hand, roughly one fourth of the kelp feeders in our study apparently had diarrhoea (R. Aanes, pers. obs.).
      https://polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/2609/html [polarresearch.net]
      
      Parent

Offtopic: Radioactive Reindeer Offtopic: Radioactive Reindeer (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @05:18AM (1 child)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @05:18AM (#842860)

In Sweden they have to test slaughtered deer for a radioisotope of cesium since they eat fungi that readily absorbed the fallout from Chernobyl.

Re:Offtopic: Radioactive Reindeer (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @05:26AM

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @05:26AM (#842868)

Seaweed is a good source of iodine too.

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There is There is (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday May 13 2019, @05:25AM (9 children)

by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday May 13 2019, @05:25AM (#842867) Journal

This involved -- and there is no polite way to say it -- collecting and testing their poop.

There is a polite way to say it. It involved collecting and testing their excrements.

--
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

Life finds a way (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @09:00AM

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @09:00AM (#842919)

Even when the ground is radioactive
See the fish from the Simpsons as an example or the snake recently found in Australia with three eyes

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