NORWAY — With one foot braced on the helicopter’s landing skid, a veterinarian lifted his air rifle, took aim and fired a tranquilizer dart at a polar bear.
The predator bolted but soon slumped into the snowdrifts, its broad frame motionless beneath the Arctic sky.
The dramatic pursuit formed part of a pioneering research mission in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where scientists, for the first time, took fat tissue biopsies from polar bears to study the impact of pollutants on their health.
The expedition came at a time when the Arctic region was warming at four times the global average, putting mounting pressure on the iconic predators as their sea-ice habitat shrank.
“The idea is to show as accurately as possible how the bears live in the wild — but in a lab,” Laura Pirard, a Belgian toxicologist, told AFP.
“To do this, we take their (fatty) tissue, cut it in very thin slices and expose it to the stresses they face, in other words pollutants and stress hormones,” said Pirard, who developed the method.
Moments after the bear collapsed, the chopper circled back and landed. Researchers spilled out, boots crunching on the snow.
One knelt by the bear’s flank, cutting thin strips of fatty tissue. Another drew blood.
Each sample was sealed and labelled before the bear was fitted with a satellite collar.
