Here's one possible summer menu for polar bears being forced to stay on land due to a lack of reliable sea ice: 60 snow goose egg clutches, 53 goslings, 63 adult geese, 3 caribou calves, and 3 adult caribou. Garnish with berries. Bon appétit.

Linda J. Gormezano, an ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, isn't a polar bear chef. But she has been figuring out what polar bears might have to eat to survive increasingly long ice-free seasons in the western part of Canada's Hudson Bay area (map).

Her calculations, presented this week at the North America Congress for Conservation Biology in Missoula, Montana, suggest that the predators may be