Arctic Foxes Essay

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As the weather in northern climates continues to change it becomes more important to the effects of the change on local species. The ability of theses northern species to adapted affects their survival s. Arctic foxes are one of the main predators of the terrestrial arctic ecosystem. Foxes main prey consists of small rodents, birds and their eggs in the summer and spring. Arctic foxes travel large distances searching for prey, averaging 29 km a day. (http://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/5927638). Many studies have been done on how food and resource abundance affects the foraging patterns, but not many studies have been done on how weather patterns and changing climate may be affecting the arctic foxes. One concern is that annual spring and summer …show more content…

Fox’s foraging technique is to only eat between 2-6 % of eggs they find immediately after discovering the nest and cache the rest of them for later consumption. (Samelius and Alisauskas, 2000). My project aims to look at whether variations in summer weather temperatures affects the foraging success of Arctic foxes. Since increasing temperatures should theoretically cause foxes to allocate less energy to keeping warm it is expected that there will be an increase in foraging time with an increase in temperature. This will result in more depredation events occurring in higher temperatures. In addition increasing temperature should cause an increase in food finding as noticed by increase in food …show more content…

If the results show temperature does affect the forging habit of arctic foxes this could have detrimental impacts on the balance of the Artic ecosystem. The changing temperature could have implications the longer term stability of the Arctic fox population. If rising temperatures cause an increase in the fox’s ability to find bountiful food supplies, it could cause a population burst resulting in overpopulation of the foxes. A very common example of this is of White tailed deer in North America. Deer became overabundant due to a surplus of food from agriculture, causing a large population growth resulting in over population. This overpopulation has caused damages to the ecosystem due to it increasing for more food resources. This over grazing resulted in a dramatic disappearance much of the local vegetation species as well as an increase in the mortality of the deer due to starvation from the resultant habitat loss. (https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gJE6JTNHd_UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA119&dq=overpopulation+due+to+prey+abundance&ots=4gP3mEDG1z&sig=21tjsofihVROZ_Txk3C8FoGHm2c#v=onepage&q=overpopulation%20due%20to%20prey%20abundance&f=false) . This resource instability may occur in Artic foxes due to overpopulation threatening the prey species of the Arctic Foxes. Arctic breeding shorebirds could be at risk due to the over population of Arctic Foxes. With more Arctic foxes there

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