Often portrayed as pulling Santa's sleigh, reindeer are a Christmas staple. Now, ecologists have found that reindeer are shrinking due to the impact of climate change on their food supplies.
Speaking at the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Liverpool this week, researchers will reveal that over the past 20 years -- during a period of noticeable summer and winter warming in the Arctic -- reindeer on Svalbard have got smaller and lighter. Ecologists from the James Hutton Institute, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and Norwegian University of Life Sciences have worked in the high Arctic since 1994, measuring and weighing the reindeer. Each winter they catch, mark and measure 10-month-old calves, returning each year to recapture them and track their size and weight as adults.