From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://abcnews.go.com/International/polar-bears-rewriting-dna-survive-warming-arctic-study/story?id=128278604

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13100-025-00387-4

One population of polar bears in Greenland are showing higher
transposable element transcription than the other. They think that this
means that the transposable elements are moving around the genome
because a lot of them are related to retrovirus that have an RNA
intermediate. They haven't done the genome sequencing to determine that
more transposition is going on. The highest level of transcription is occurring in the population most stressed by higher temperatures.

They also make the claim that polar bears may be extinct by the end of
the century. I don't know how they make these predictions. More ice
melted last interglacial and sea levels were much higher than they are
now. The polar bears survived somewhere, and it likely is not where
people currently inhabit. We have to figure out where this habitat
existed last time so that polar bears can survive another interglacial.

If global warming skips the next ice age, there likely isn't any point
in trying to keep them alive except in zoos. They need to be collecting genetic samples to recreate a viable population a hundred thousand years
in the future when the ice age may start again.

Ron Okimoto

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