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Russian PM puts satellite collar on polar bear on Franz Josef Land

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Russian PM puts satellite collar on polar bear on Franz Josef Land

MOSCOW, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the Alexandra Land, one of the Franz Josef Land archipelago islands in Russia’s far north, where he took part in the work of a research expedition studying polar bear habitats and put a satellite collar on a polar bear, the government’s press service said on Thursday.

After the An-72 aircraft landed near the Nagurskaya frontier post, the Russian prime minister took a tracked cross-country vehicle to get to the base of the Russian Institute of Ecology and Evolution expedition, where the institute’s directors, Vyacheslav Rozhkov, informed him of the expedition’s activities.

Then, assisted by the expedition members, Putin put a collar on a bear previously put to sleep for safety reasons. While the animal was being measured from nose to tail and weighed, Putin stroke the bear and patted its ear.

The study of polar bear habitat was sponsored by the Russian Geographical Society, which allocated a one-million-rouble grant, Rozhkov told the Russian prime minister. It will help to preserve and recover the polar bear population.

According to Rozhkov, some 6,000 polar bears inhabit the Russian part of the Arctic, while the global polar bear population stands at 25,000.

“In conditions of shrinking ice cover in the Arctic due to climate changes and human activity, polar bear habitats are changing globally, although no one knows the mechanism,” Rozhkov said, adding that melting ice forces polar bears move to continental areas with poorer food potential, where they become an easy game for poachers.

“It is hard to calculate the exact number of the polar bear population, but what we can say for sure is that the death rate has grown,” said Nikita Ovsyannikov, a world-renown Russian polar bear researcher and deputy director of the Wrangel Island state nature reserve.

It was not Putin’s first contact with the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. In September 2008, he put a similar collar on a Siberian tiger in Russia’s Far East. And in July 2009, he visited the Chkalov Island in the Russian Far Eastern Khabarovsk territory, where the institute’s expedition studies white whale migration routes.

AREMNPRESS

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