Climate change isn’t just shrinking ice caps — reindeer are getting smaller too

Climate change may be doing more than shrinking ice caps and raising sea levels, according to some researchers. For reindeer on one Arctic island chain near the North Pole, it also means they may be losing weight.

Reindeer in Svalbard, an island chain between Norway and the North Pole, have lost about 15 pounds on average since the 1990s as temperatures have climbed, according to Steve Albon, an ecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, the Guardian reported. The average weight of the adult animals is now 106 lbs, combared to 121 lbs two decades ago.

Albon, who led a study with researchers from Norway, suggested that warmer temperatures meant the precipitation that used to be snowfall in the northern climes was now falling as rain — rain that then freezes into hard ice that locks away the moss and grasses reindeer eat.

"Warmer summers are great for reindeer but winters are getting increasingly tough," he said, according to the Guardian. According to the study, the increasingly scarce food supply in the winter has meant female reindeer are giving birth to smaller calves or not successfully completing their pregnancies at all.

But the warmer temperatures in the summer have also meant that the number of reindeer on the island chain is growing, even as their body masses shrink. The higher summer temperatures mean even more food is available in the autumn, “which should lead to heavier and more fertile individuals,” according to the study.

Essentially, “we have more but smaller reindeer," Albon told Reuters.

But Albon also cautioned that the rising population of smaller reindeer means their population is more unstable. “There may well be more smaller reindeer in the Arctic in the coming decades, but possibly at risk of catastrophic die-offs because of increased ice on the ground,” he said, according to the Telegraph.

Reindeer aren’t the only species being studied by scientists in the rapidly changing Arctic: Several studies have examined the threat climate change has had on polar bears, which need the melting ice to help them hunt seals in the autumn and winter.

This story was originally published December 12, 2016 at 5:31 AM with the headline "Climate change isn’t just shrinking ice caps — reindeer are getting smaller too."