Arctic foxes?

Question

what are some negative human impacts on arctic foxes, how is it coping with the impacts?

Answer 1

I'm not a foxologist, so this is guesswork ...

Hunting: humans hunt foxes. From the fox point of view, this is negative, but the populations are actually endangered in only a few places.

Rabies: The foxes carry rabies. I don't know for sure, but I would guess this is a result of exposure to domestic dogs. Again, the populations are not really endangered, so the disease isn't devastating them. I guess the foxes are evolving to be resistant to the disease.

Canine Distemper: Exposure to domestic dogs also spreads this disease in other places, so I would guess that it affects arctic foxes now too. As with rabies, the population is holding up, and the fox species would be evolving an immune system that would cope with the disease.

*Note that it is possible that foxes were carrying both rabies and distemper prior to exposure to humans*

Pollution: The arctic environment is notorious for accumulating pollution, especially in the animals themselves, due to the climate and the slow turnover of biomass. I would guess that foxes face risks similar to polar bears and are coping in similar ways, if you can find any info about the bears to refer to.

Global warming: As the world warms, the ecosystems of the northern latitudes will move north. The difficulty is that when it gets too warm, the ecosystems will migrate off the tops of the continents, and then when the ice melts, they will disappear completely. In the case of polar bears, the loss of sea ice, and its migration too far north, has meant that the bears can't hunt seals on the pack ice the way that they are designed to. This is killing the bears. I would guess that arctic foxes face similar risks if their life cycle depends explicitly on aspects of the arctic climate - i.e. if they store lemmings in frozen burrows for winter meals, and there aren't frozen burrows any more, then the foxes will starve.

A last impact is a complicated bit of ecology: red foxes compete with arctic foxes and take their range. But gray wolves hunt red foxes and so that kept the numbers of red foxes down, and arctic foxes up. However, humans have now hunted gray wolves until there are very few left in some areas. This has meant that red foxes are now more common, and so arctic foxes have lost their range to red foxes: the human hunting of gray wolves has made it harder for arctic foxes to survive due to competition with red foxes.

Like I said, though, this is guesswork. You can see if the things I wrote make sense in terms of the Wikipedia entry and other on-line resources, and then use what makes the most sense.

Answer 2

People are trying to get rid of all kinds of creatures! Theyre Professor McCleach.

Answer 3

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