Drivers of polar bear behavior and the possible effects of prey availability on foraging strategy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Change in behavior is one of the earliest responses to variation in habitat suitability. It is therefore important to understand the conditions that promote different behaviors, particularly in areas undergoing environmental change. Animal movement is tightly linked to behavior and remote tracking can be used to study ethology when direct observation is not possible.

Methods

We used movement data from 14 polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Hudson Bay, Canada, during the foraging season (January-June), when bears inhabit the sea ice. We developed an error-tolerant method to correct for sea ice drift in tracking data. Next, we used hidden Markov models with movement and orientation relative to wind to study three behaviors (stationary, area-restricted search, and olfac

SUBMITTER: Togunov RR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9670556 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature