According to a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society on the 8th, between 1995 and 2015, the genetic diversity of polar bears on the Svalbard Islands in Norway decreased by 10% due to inbreeding. Scientists at the Norwegian Polar Institute studied 20 years of ecological and engineering data to investigate genetic trends in polar bear populations on the archipelago. The study noted that the loss of genetic diversity is linked to the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Barents Sea. According to the study, the reason for the decrease in gene flow is that shrinking sea ice coverage has led to habitat fragmentation and "increased inbreeding of polar bears in key sampling areas." The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says the Barents Sea is losing ice the fastest in the Arctic, driven by the climate crisis. "When the population shrinks to a certain extent, you will find that the chances of closely related individuals mating and producing offspring increase. The attendant risk is that some recessive characteristics will begin to appear in the population." The author of the study, Norwegian Bioeconomic Research Simo Maduna, a scholar at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, said. Top predators rely on ice to travel, hunt, rest and reproduce. They mostly wander on sea ice and rarely come ashore. Climate crisis is changing polar bears' diets, and human-bear conflicts could increase Another study in April also found that the climate crisis is changing polar bears' diets
