Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Aug 17/98) - As a professor of biology, Dr. Sara Iverson wants to know how polar bears make their living.

Or more specifically, she wants to know exactly what they feed on and to do that, she plans to study seal blubber.

"We're trying to understand the foraging ecology of the polar bear by looking at the fatty acid signatures," says Iverson, pointing to the seal as the primary diet of the polar bear.

Fatty acids are the complex building blocks of fat and travel up the food chain intact. Iverson can catalogue and identify different kinds of animals in the flesh samples of their predators.

Using this method, the Dalhousie University employee says that by examining the blubber of different kinds of seals, she will be able to identify them in biopsies taken from living polar bears.

"It's hard and expensive to have access to polar bears and it's difficult to understand seal diet so we've developed a method where we take a sample of the blubber of seal and take a small biopsy of the blubber of a polar bear," says Iverson.

The information will allow her and her colleague Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service to predict the type and population of seal that is being ingested by the different populations of polar bears.

To date, the team has collected about 200 samples each, of polar bear and seal fat, but to complete their four-year study, they have recently asked people in the Iqaluit area that are hunting Davis Strait ringed and bearded seals to take a small piece of seal fat into the local resources, wildlife and economic development office. Paying $10 for each sample, Iverson asks that it be fresh-frozen and clearly labelled with species, age, sex, location caught and date of kill.

But what does this data mean to Northerners?

Iverson says it's twofold.

"It's helpful in managing the population of marine mammals and people are trying to understand polar bears."

A report on their findings should be ready this fall.