With the summer ocean ice melt quicker and moving far from shoring in the Arctic , glacial bears are force to swim for several 24-hour interval in the clear water supply in club to find out intellectual nourishment and a place to remain , grant to a newEcographystudy published last week .

frigid bears are ice - obligate , vertex predators who prefer to hunt SEAL in ocean ice habitat on the continental ledge . In seasonal - ice ecosystem , feeding is especially intense in springtime when seals are more vulnerable , allowing the bear to accumulate their energetic stores . When sea ice begins to melt down in the late spring , polar bears migrate to land or seaward pack chalk for the summer .

But environmental changes are occurring in the Arctic more apace than anywhere else on the satellite . And or else of walking on a coalesced sea ice Earth’s surface , polar bears are force to undertake long - length swims to complete their migratory itinerary .   While they ’re adept swimmers , energetically - costly swim of 50 kilometers ( 31 mi ) or more are very risky .

To study the swimming behavior of the Arctic predators in our alter world , a squad led by Nicholas Pilfold from the University of Alberta hit the books data on over a hundred polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) that were monitor with GPS planet - linked telemetry during their seasonal migrations from 2007 to 2012 . These included 58 adult female person and 18 subadults from the Beaufort Sea and 59 adult female from Hudson Bay .

The squad identified a total of 115 swim in the records of 135 collared bears – virtually half of which completed at least one long - aloofness swimming . The duration of these swims cast between 1.3 and 9.3 Day , and 51 to 404 kilometers ( 32 to 250 miles ) in distance . In the Beaufort Sea , gelid bears without offspring were more likely to swim farseeing space . Meanwhile , small fry swam as often as solitary grownup female person , but more oft than female with new cubs .

In the Beaufort Sea in 2004 , 25 percent of the adult females made at least one retentive - distance swim , but in 2012 – as the pace of open pee gain increase – that dimension jump-start up to 69 per centum . " Given the go on trend of ocean chicken feed loss , we recognize that an increased frequency in the pauperization to engross in this behavior may have serious implications for population of diametrical bears dwell around the Arctic Basin , " Pilfold said in astatement .