Penn State University Biology Professor Beth Shapiro holds up part of a horse's jaw at Stuart Schmidt's Quartz Creek mine in the Yukon. She's looking at DNA from caribou, as well as from extinct horses and steppe buffalo, to get a better sense of how the size and health of the animals' herds changed over time. All photos courtesy Beth Shapiro

Conservationists working to preserve caribou populations in the Arctic may have the best of intentions, but they’re hampered by a shortage of scientific data on how to appropriately manage these dwindling populations.

Researchers on a project funded by the National Science Foundation hope to remedy this situation by studying the population fluctuations of three large arctic mammals — and in two of the cases their eventual extinction — over the past 700,000 years. The group, led by Penn State University Biology Professor Beth Shapiro, is taking DNA from the bones of caribou, as well as from extinct arctic horses and steppe buffalo to track the size and strength of their herds over time. This information is correlated with data about temperature, plant availability and animal competition in those areas at the time when the animals were living.

“Ancient DNA provides the mechanism to go back in time and to watch populations change as their environment changes,” Shapiro said.

The research will provide conservationists with tools to understand how to better protect today’s animals. One of the main questions is how much human impact is to blame for declining populations.

The group finished the first of three messy field seasons this summer tramping through the Yukon mud. They’re visiting different active gold mines each summer to collect bones as the miners unearth them from the permafrost.

The scientists spent time this summer at Stuart Schmidt's Quartz Creek mine in the Yukon. The area is particularly useful for researchers who need to date bones because layers of volcanic ash, whose age is easily determined, have fallen in the area over many thousands of years, making it easy to date the bones discovered in those layers.

“Permafrost provides the ideal environment to preserve DNA,” Shapiro said. “It’s like sticking something in a freezer for 100,000 years.”

Furthermore, the Klondike region where they’re focusing has an added benefit. Layers of volcanic ash from Aleutian eruptions settled there over the millennia. Scientists can accurately date those layers, which makes it easy to date the bones that are unearthed within them.

Collaborator Grant Zazula, Yukon palaeontologist with the Canadian Department of Tourism and Culture, describes the work as “running around the smelly, frozen muck looking for bones.” One of the highlights this summer, he said, was finding a five-foot-long wooly mammoth skull with matching six-foot tusks.

While that exceptional find didn’t help with the study, the group did collect its goal of 50 bones from each of the three species at each mine. They’ll extract DNA from these bones back home in the lab. The rule of thumb is that the more genetic diversity in a population the larger that population is. So the scientists track the ups and downs through that DNA diversity.

At the end of each day, the researchers sorted, dried and labeled the bones they collected. In this photo Jana Morehouse, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Yukon Palaeontologist Grant Zazula with the Canadian government, and Mathias Stiller, a post-doctoral fellow at Penn State University, look over the day's haul.

The project grew out of an earlier one that included some of the same collaborators who were looking exclusively at bison. Bison in North America today have little genetic diversity. The easiest theory to explain this is that when humans showed up, we killed off so many of them. But the DNA research showed that bison populations started declining 35,000 years ago, which is 24,000 years before humans appeared on the scene.

“It seems like, at least with bison, humans are off the hook,” Shapiro said.

Another theory is that large mammal populations ebb and flow with each global warm and cold cycle, of which there have been many in the past couple million years. Because the bison study relied on radiocarbon dating, which can go back only 50,000-60,000 years, the scientists could only see the end of the most recent cycle. Perhaps every time global temperatures cool, populations decline; and then they rev back up when it warms, Shapiro said.

The current study is an effort to gather data to explore that theory. The mines are unearthing bones that are about 80,000 years old, 300,000 years old and 700,000 years old.

The group chose the three animals they’re studying because they were the three most abundant large mammals in the Arctic. Arctic horses went extinct about 10,000-12,000 years ago and bison went extinct there about 2,000 years ago, Shapiro said.

Among the things they hope to learn, Zazula said, is whether some species responded well to warming, and if so whether that was because they acclimated to the changed climate or because of reduced competition for food. Also, they hope to learn about the bison and horse populations leading up to their extinction. Were they in steady decline or were they doing well and then suddenly crashed? With caribou, it will be useful to learn whether their declining populations today are part of a steady decline since the end of the last ice age or if it’s something that might be newer and presumably related to humans.

“We can give present day wildlife managers some key information,” Zazula said. “Possibly give them population thresholds to aim for or to be careful of, or give them information on optimal habitats, especially since we are seeing some rapid changes in global climates and associated environmental change.”

Shapiro explained that conservationists could use the research to understand which caribou populations have already tipped toward inevitable extinction, which would allow them to focus on populations that seem more likely to survive.

“There are quite a lot of conservation decisions that people are going to have to make,” she said. “This is especially true as the pace of global climate change continues to increase.”

–Emily Stone

Comments (0) Sep 23 2010

"I thought I better send you one of my favorite Greenland sled dog photos," Ed Stockard wrote a couple weeks ago. "I KNOW how Jill and the PFS gang love dogs. This happy puppy ran eagerly up when I lowered the camera to the ground. Taken at the local Kangerlussuaq dog kennels in 2006." Photo: Ed Stockard

Ed’s right: PFS is doggedly pro-canine, so much so that we have a “Dog Day” schedule among our other Google calendars to avoid the playful chaos that might ensue if certain PFS dog combos showed up on the same day.

Turns out we’re on to something. Researchers at Central Michigan University recently have published preliminary findings from research intended to assess the impact of having dogs in the work place. The team, led by Stephen Colarelli, PhD, conducted two experiments with people working in teams of four, some with and others without dogs in their midst. Per this article in The Economist, the groups who worked around dogs “ranked their team-mates more highly on measures of trust, team cohesion and intimacy than those who had not.”

The results are preliminary and will be updated with final analysis later this year, but so far they suggest what we already believe to be true: instead of the workplace being a dog-eat-dog world, add some bow wow to the day to make it doggone fun.  —Kip Rithner

Comments (0) Sep 22 2010

We recently received some beautiful pictures from Tatiana Gurtovaya, who, along with her  colleague Alexander Zhulidov, lives in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and coordinates sampling for Drs. Max Holmes (Woods Hole Research Center) and Bruce Peterson (Marine Biological Lab) on the Arctic Great Rivers Observatory (Arctic-GRO) project.

The Lena River in August. All photos: Tatiana Gurtovaya

The project, funded under the auspices of the International Polar Year, involves assessing river constituent (chemistry, isotopes, nutrients) fluxes and discharge in the Ob’, Yenisey, Lena, Kolyma, Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers.

Again, the Lena River in August.

These observations will be used to test hypotheses about the magnitude, controls and ecological significance of these fluxes. The field work will also provide new information on how changes in the rivers impacts the Arctic Ocean. By measuring the flux of water and constituents in these key rivers at the junction between the continents and the Arctic Ocean, the scientists believe they can assess changes occurring across vast regions of the continents.

In other words, the rivers may reveal what is going on inland and that information could help  forecast imminent changes in circulation and biogeochemical processes in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans.

The Arctic Ocean in May.

Monitoring the great arctic rivers is an essential component of any comprehensive Arctic Observatory program and is critical for understanding environmental change in the Arctic.

Arctic-GRO is based upon strong scientific collaborations among US, Canadian and Russian scientists. It also represents a major component of the Arctic Circumpolar Coastal Observatory Network (ACCO-Net), an overarching IPY initiative designed to link key coastal erosion monitoring sites with major arctic river sampling sites established as part of the NSF Freshwater Integration (FWI) study.

The project links back to the Student Partners Project, a ground-breaking science and education effort conceived by Max Holmes that involved local K-12 students and their teachers at each sampling site. Arctic-GRO teachers and their students are educated in global change and in turn collect river samples of selected constituents at higher frequencies than would otherwise be possible, thereby improving the science.

Comments (0) Sep 21 2010

Josh Dugat shows off the Schwarz flag at Portage Glacier near Anchorage. All photos courtesy Josh Dugat

“I’ve lived in the South my whole life. PolarTREC exposed me to a world I never would have known otherwise. I want my students to know that their teacher is a dynamic person who gets excited about discovery. Hopefully, this will motivate them to take advantage of opportunities in their own lives. Even students and staff at Schwarz can be recognized and get to do something extreme.” — Josh Dugat

Inner City School

 Josh Dugat is the only science teacher at Schwarz Academy, one of two alternative schools for the Recovery School District in New Orleans. Schwarz serves students who have been expelled from other schools or who have been found guilty of Class III infractions, or incarcerated for drugs, violence, and other offenses. Dugat’s inner-city classroom can be a revolving door as students come and go throughout the school year.

Into The Wild

It’s a long way from his sweltering classroom to the Arctic, but this year Dugat participated in the PolarTREC program as part of a team working on the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) network.

Established in 1991, CALM includes researchers from fifteen countries and 175 sites across the Arctic, Antarctica, and several alpine locations where scientists study permafrost.

Arctic Exploration

Dugat’s summer adventure took him about as far from the Gulf Coast as a person can get: First stop, Anchorage, where Dugat, along with Elliot Upin and Kelsey Nyland, attended the North Slope Training Cooperative “Unescorted North Slope” Safety Orientation.

Training

Required of anyone headed to the northern Alaskan oil fields, the daylong training covered accident prevention, emergency response, the dangers of hydrogen sulfide, as well as what to do upon meeting polar bears or other arctic wildlife.

The next day, after a few more training videos at the British Petroleum building downtown, Dugat spent a rainy day with other members of the research team visiting the Anchorage Museum, Independence Gold mine, Eklutna Historical Park and finally, eating a dinner of reindeer sausage at George Washington University graduate student, Ellen Hatleberg’s house. The next day they visited the Portage Glacier and the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

Into the Field

Kelsey Nyland, Josh Dugat, Cathy Sebold, Anna Klene and Elliott Upin cross the Arctic Circle on the Dalton highway.

From Anchorage, Dugat, Upin and Nyland, along with GW Post-Doc Dmitriy Streletskiy drove to Fairbanks, picked up a few more of the project’s scientists—Anna Klene (University of Montana) and Cathy Seybold (USDA)—and headed up the 400-mile Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.

Along the way, the team stopped at two soil monitoring sites to record soil and air temperature, moisture content, precipitation levels, and solar radiation levels. The focus of these sites is to observe conditions affecting the active layer, the upper layer of soil that exists above permafrost and freezes and thaws with the seasons.

Probing the Permafrost (Tour de Alaska)

Duct tape to the rescue! Josh Dugat and Kelsey Nyland repair a damaged data logger tripod.

That was only the beginning of Dugat’s relationship with permafrost. At CALM sites in and around Prudhoe Bay, he became an “active layer prober,” taking two measurements of the active layer depth every 100 meters on 1 square km grids, totaling 242 measurements per grid! In the video below, Dugat explains how it all works:

Permafrost on YouTube

Between stints in Prudhoe Bay, the team checked in at Toolik Field Station. From there they took helicopter shuttles to access remote ‘flux’ sites, where soil and air temperatures are continuously recorded. Dugat spent most of his time repairing tripods and data loggers damaged by interested animals.

Final stop: Barrow. From the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), Dugat and the team took a final round of thaw depth measurements on grids established in the 1960s. They also measured the tundra surface with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instruments, which use reflected laser light to produce very detailed images.

A Teacher’s Perspective

During the next couple of days in Barrow, Dugat toured the science lab at Barrow High School, and visited the Inupiat Heritage Center. Among his other unusual stops, he also gathered data from a temperature monitor scientists maintain in a permafrost meat cellar.

BASC station manager, Lewis Brower, explained to Dugat the life of a whaling captain (allowing him to taste muktuk – whale blubber and skin). In his last day in town, Dugat caught the end of the Barrow Whalers football game against the Valdez Buccaneers and went for a “Polar Bear” swim in the Arctic Ocean.

Home Again

Now, back in his New Orleans classroom, Dugat is charged with sharing his experiences with his students. He says he wants to inspire them to investigate the unexpected parallels between tundra and bayou.

Climate Change and Katrina

“There’s definitely a climate-change connection, particularly for students who experienced Katrina. Engineering problems associated with land subsidence here in Southeastern Louisiana relate to building concerns for those designing structures on permafrost,” explains Dugat. “Albeit for different reasons, land in both regions exhibits subsidence.”

Dugat also mentions the industrial similarities between the North Slope and Gulf Coast. BP is the primary operator for North Slope oil wells, and has a particular presence in the New Orleans area, given the events surrounding last spring’s Deepwater Horizon Spill.

Portrait of a Teaching Career

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans public school system in 2005, many doors were opened for education reform in the city. Dugat came to New Orleans in 2009 as one of many Teach for America teachers. Once Dugat completed the Teach for America certification program, which trains K-12 teachers and places them in high-need areas, Dugat became passionate about student achievement in the Crescent City.

Teaching at an alternative school has its own unique brand of challenges. Dugat doesn’t always know how long a student will remain in his class or when another will show up. Consequently, engaging his 9^th-12^th grade students in complex topics like climate change can be difficult. Exposure, Dugat says, is key. Parlaying his experience into a teachable moment helps the students contextualize the information.

“It is doubtful they would ever hear about it (Arctic climate change),” explains Dugat. “It’s debatable whether permafrost directly influences their daily lives, but if students are made aware of its presence, then they are made aware of the world between here and the Arctic, and that everything in between is connected. It’s important for them to read about and hear about things they and the people they know have never done before.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Sep 20 2010

Amy Breen and Cody Johnson, 4 September 2010, Fielding Lake. Photo: Christie Haupert

Newest Polar Field Services Alaska team member, project manager Cody Johnson, is a newlywed and a good sport. The picture is evidence of the former, and his good-natured willingness to tell us (all of us!) about his nuptials proves the latter. Coming to us fresh from an NSF-funded post-doc fellowship at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Cody brings a customer’s perspective to our group, and judging from his wedding guest list, he shares our love of the four-leggers. We are thrilled to welcome him and his lovely bride, Amy, to the larger PFS/CPS family.

My beautiful new bride is Amy Breen.  She is a podoctoral researcher at UAF in the SNAP (Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning) program.  We were married on September 4^th on the front step of a cabin at Fielding Lake in the Delta Mountain Range, Alaska.  Our wedding was attended by a small (14 people and 11 dogs) group of close friends (including Christie Haupert), and was presided over by a close friend of ours. 

Actually the second part is a funny story.  The gentleman who presided over our wedding was Ben Abbott.  He is a Ph.D. student at UAF.  During the summer of 2007 Ben was my field assistant at Toolik Field Station.  That summer I was completely smitten with Amy and spent a lot of time trying to get her to pay attention to me.  Ben, who was much younger, and in my mind quite naïve about such matters, kept encouraging me to just lay my cards on the table (so to speak) and tell Amy how I felt.  Finally at the end of the summer (with two days left before I left Toolik) I professed my feelings for Amy after much encouragement from Ben (and maybe a bit of liquid confidence from a hoppy beverage or two).  Low and behold she felt the same, and three years later, including a year of long-distance Logan Utah to Fairbanks Alaska relationship, we are happily married.

As part of our wedding, rather than driving off in a car following the ceremony, we canoed out into Fielding Lake watching bald eagles and loons.  For our honeymoon we spent 4 days paddling ~30 miles on the Delta River.  The weather was awful (non-stop rain and high winds), but the trip was fantastic.  The fall colors in Alaska were spectacular, we had river otters playing next to our boats….perfect Alaska wedding and honeymoon. 

Comments (0) Sep 20 2010