It’s not just climate change that endangers the survival of the polar bear ( Ursus maritimus ), one of the largest and most threatened carnivorous mammals on the planet.
According to a study by an international team of scientists, including María Jesús Obregón, a professor at the Institute for Biomedical Research (a mixed center of the CSIC and the Autonomous University of Madrid), plastic pollution and environmental pollutants in their habitat also they are beginning to seriously affect your endocrine system and your reproductive cycle .
Certainly, climate change is its main enemy, but we must not forget nutritional stress, the reduction of polar ice, contact with man, disease, parasites and exposure to environmental pollutants, which are reducing the health of the bear arctic polar .
The aforementioned work, led by Norwegian scientists and published in Environmental Research , emphasizes that plastic pollution and environmental pollutants affect the endocrine system and the bear’s reproductive system, which “is especially important in this species, since it is in the process of of extinction ”, says Obregón.
The researchers focused on the Arctic polar bear that lives in Greenland, as it is exposed to increasing levels of “a wide variety of organochlorine pollutants and pesticides, which impact on thyroid hormones in plasma, tissues and deiodine enzymes, which are the in charge of keeping hormonal levels stable ”, concludes the expert.
Concerned about the loss of the polar bear’s frozen habitat, which is increasingly threatened, another international team of scientists has produced a guide to monitoring its health. The study, published in Science of the Total Environment , collects 15 values that allow determining the factors that would facilitate its conservation in the Arctic Circle .
The main threats identified are climate change, nutritional stress, chronic physiological stress, disease and parasites, and increasing exposure to confrontation with other rival bears.
