Polar Bears are not able to adapt their feeding habits to cope with the increasingly warmer summers and ice melt associated with global warming caused by human behavior.  It casts a grim shadow on hopes for the survival of the species in a warmer world.

Earlier, some researcher suggested the bears would enter a kind of “walking hibernation”, a low activity state that would be similar to the way other species of bears sleep through winters.  But that’s not the case with Polar Bears.  New research shows the bears simply starve when their main food source is depleted.

“We didn’t find anything that looks like hibernation,” said lead researcher and University of Wyoming biologist John P. Whiteman.  The study gathered a range of information on Polar Bear physiology during their summers on land and on ice over several years.  “(The) loss of hunting opportunities in summer probably affects polar bears the same way that loss of food would affect most mammals in a normal metabolic state,” says Whiteman.

Polar bears thrive on a diet of seals, especially between April and July.  That’s when blubbery mammals take to slabs of ice to molt and rear their pups – easy pickings for the largest land-based predator.

But as the world warms, the ice retreats further north in the Arctic Circle every summer.  Some bears try to follow, and some drown.  Others take to the shore to forage, and prospects there are quite poor.