Muskoxen don't migrate long distances, the way caribou do, so they are susceptible to dramatic weather changes.
Animals Are Shrinking and Freezing to Death in a Changing Arctic
Unusual weather brought by climate change is making it tough for muskoxen to get food—and sometimes even entombs them in ice.
Muskoxen, the plant-chomping, long-haired mammals that huddle on the Arctic tundra, are being born smaller in parts of the far north, as pregnant mothers struggle to find food.
One reason, according to new research published Thursday in Scientific Reports: Muskoxen eat most of the year by pawing through snow with their hooves. But rising temperatures mean precipitation increasingly falls as rain, only to then freeze on the surface, encasing plant life in inaccessible ice.
Meanwhile, in a type of freak weather event likely to become more common, more than 50 muskoxen died swamped in ice, as gusts of howling winds drove ice and freezing waters from a tidal surge so far inland that fish were found a half-mile from shore. Rising
