Linda J. Gormezano, an ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, isn't a polar bear chef. But she has been figuring out what polar bears might have to eat to survive increasingly long ice-free seasons in the western part of Canada's Hudson Bay area.
Her calculations, presented this week at the North America Congress for Conservation Biology in Missoula, Montana, suggest that the predators may be able to survive for six months on land-based foods, and, because of climate change, they may have to.