Starvation killed 80,000 reindeer after unusual Arctic rains cut off the animals food supply

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Starvation killed 80,000 reindeer after unusual Arctic rains cut off the animals’ food supply

By Ben Guarino November 16 at 6:16 AM

In August, a lightning blast claimed the lives of more than 300 reindeer in Norway. The month before, an anthrax epidemic — which Russian officials blamed on microbes that thawed after spending decades frozen inside a reindeer corpse — sickened several indigenous people in Siberia. Anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy, and reindeer died by the hundreds. In the disease’s aftermath, the regional government proposed to terminate 250,000 reindeer by Christmas. Rudolph still can’t catch a break.

Even the Arctic tundra has turned against the animals, so well-adapted to the clime, as the area warms at a faster rate than the rest of the globe.

In November 2013, 61,000 reindeer starved to death on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula. It marked the largest regional “mortality episode” of reindeer ever recorded, as ecologists wrote in a new study in the journal Biology Letters. An additional 20,000 had succumbed to famine in November 2006. The immediate cause, according to the team of researchers from Europe, the United States and Asia, was an unusual ice barrier that smothered the reindeer pastures.

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It may seem counterintuitive that warmer weather brings more ice to parts of Siberia like the Yamal Peninsula. But when warming causes the thinning of nearby Arctic sea ice — which wind and waves then fracture — or its complete melting, the warm Atlantic water below is revealed. As Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers University Arctic specialist told The Post in May, the Arctic has reached “record-breaking territory”: low Arctic sea ice, high temperatures and fire seasons that start sooner each year.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/16/starvation-killed-80000-reindeer-after-unusual-arctic-rains-cut-off-the-animals-food-supply/

[Worried senior]

1. I always feel so bad

for the animals.

[lonestarnot]

2. So fucking sad.

[mopinko]

3. and this is just the start.

we are about to get quite and education into the things that we have taken for granted. we are about to be fish, discovering the water, just as it boils away.