Hannah Hoag

Category: features

  • In Canada’s boreal forest, a new national park faces the wrongs of the past — and guards our climate future

    In Canada’s boreal forest, a new national park faces the wrongs of the past — and guards our climate future

    AUDUBON

    James Marlowe zips along the glassy lake surface of the water in his aluminum fishing boat, and the town of Łutsël K’é quickly falls from sight. We stay close to the shoreline, avoiding hidden reefs, and steer straight for his net. It’s closing in on midnight, but Great Slave Lake—the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest in the world—is flashing with fish and the tree-covered hills are aglow in the setting summer sun. Marlowe cuts the motor and begins hauling in the 150-foot net hand-over-hand.

    Splop! The first fish lands in a large plastic bin. Splop! Splop! Marlowe moves along the net, plucking whitefish from its mesh. With some effort, he untangles a 30-pound trout and heaves the rare find into the bin. “Oh, there are still more fish! It’s not going to stop, man,” he says with a laugh.

    Since he was a teen, Marlowe has hunted, trapped, and fished these wilds for caribou, moose, ducks, whitefish, and lake trout. Like his neighbors and ancestors of the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation, he’s followed traplines that meander from the forest to  tundra and strung nets under the lake ice to harvest food. “We depend on the land and the water for survival,” says Marlowe. “It’s like our grocery store.”

    In the early 1990s, however, diamond mining and mineral exploration in Canada’s Northwest Territories began to threaten this tradition of living off the land. The mines produced some jobs and revenue for the community, but they also caused problems. The industry’s high interest in the area concerned the elders, who then directed Marlowe’s generation to find a way to protect the land, water, and animals for their own children—and for the survival of the Dene culture, language, and way of life.

    After more than 15 years of discussion, the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation has now signed a landmark agreement with the governments of Canada and the Northwest Territories to form a massive new protected area called Thaidene Nëné, or “Land of the Ancestors.” Almost twice as large as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone national parks combined, Thaidene Nëné encompasses more than 6.4 million acres, stretching from the easternmost tip of Great Slave Lake northeast toward the Arctic territory of Nunavut. It spans the boreal forest and its transition to the heath-dominated tundra, making it one of the only protected areas in Canada to straddle the tree line—an important bridge for plants and animals that may migrate as the climate changes.

    .::. Read more at Audubon Magazine.

  • Researchers pull together to get fuller picture of Greenland sled dog

    Researchers pull together to get fuller picture of Greenland sled dog

    Greenland’s sled dogs are a distinctive part of the nation’s culture — but they’re also declining. (Carsten Egevang / The Qimmeq Project)

    ARCTIC TODAY —

    The Qimmeq Project is an interdisciplinary effort to better understand and preserve Greenland’s distinctive sled dogs.

    For more than 10,000 years, dogs have been an integral part of Arctic culture. They have guided sleds across frozen seas, barked warnings of polar bears and sniffed out seal breathing holes.

    “Having sled dogs is a big part of our history and identity. It is one of the main reasons that we as a culture are still alive, that we still live in the Arctic,” said Manumina Lund Jensen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Greenland, who presented her project at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland in October.

    Despite their dominant role in the culture, sled dogs have been in decline in Greenland for the past century. Their numbers have dwindled as traditional hunting tailed off, motorized vehicles gained traction, fatal diseases took root, and elders, who had deep knowledge about breeding and training sled dogs, passed on.

    “Climate change has had a really big impact on how we use our dogs and if we have dogs at all,” said Jensen. “If we don’t have sea ice you cannot go dog sledding and you cannot hunt for food.” Jensen’s research focuses on understanding the importance of the dog and dogsled culture.

    Greenland’s sled dogs and their cultural heritage are at risk of extinction. The number of dogs has declined from 25,000 in 2002 to fewer than 15,000 in 2016.

    Jensen is part of an interdisciplinary research team working on the Qimmeq Project, the “sled dog” project. These anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, biologists and veterinarians are studying the health, genetics and cultural and historical significance of the Greenland sled dog, in an effort to understand its history, use and significance.

    Morten Meldgaard, a professor at the University of Greenland and the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who is leading the project, says that recent research on pre-contact dogs in the Americas highlights the risk that the Greenland sled dog could die out.

    Dogs arrived in the Americas from Siberia and spread throughout the continents alongside people, according to a recent study. When the Europeans arrived, they brought their own dogs, and native American dogs virtually disappeared. Almost no trace of their legacy remains in modern American dogs. “It puts into perspective what we’re dealing with in the Arctic,” said Meldgaard, who also presented in Reykjavik.

    After the project launched, Meldgaard and his colleagues realized sled dog health needed a more prominent role in the project. “We’re identifying the science questions with the people who are going to use the knowledge we create,” he said. Access to vaccines that protect against highly contagious diseases, including canine distemper and parvovirus, and veterinary care is limited in many parts of Greenland.

    “People say that if the sled dog disappears, part of their soul and identify disappears,” said Meldgaard. “It is of great importance to be able to keep the animal — and the culture — alive.”

    .::. Read the story at ArcticToday.

  • Butterflies in the storm

    Butterflies in the storm

    As Hurricane Irma was bearing down on the Florida Keys last September, Erica Henry was watching from Raleigh, North Carolina. Henry, an ecologist, had packed up and left the Keys at the start of hurricane season and was supposed to be working on her doctoral thesis. But instead of writing code for a butterfly population model, she was checking and re-checking the hurricane’s projected path and posting anxious updates to Twitter.

    For six years, Henry had been studying some of the rarest endangered butterflies in North America, and she feared the storm seething through the Atlantic might gobble them up for good. “We always talk about how one hurricane could be the end of them,” said Henry. The day Irma slammed into the Keys, Henry approached one of the members of her advisory committee with a question: “What happens if one of your study species goes extinct during your dissertation?”

    Of the 25 native butterflies on the U.S. endangered species list, four reside in Florida. Henry is studying two of them, the Miami blue (Cyclargus thomasi bethunebakeri) and Bartram’s scrub hairstreak (Strymon acis bartrami). A former ski bum who wearied of waiting tables, Henry now copes with south Florida’s blistering sun, thorny bushes, and infinite mosquitoes in an effort to grasp what helps these butterflies thrive—and what might stave off their demise.

    For decades, efforts to save the world’s rarest butterflies have come up short. Many species have only become rarer—or extinct—sometimes after scientists and conservationists adopted seemingly cautious interventions that turned dire. Nick Haddad, Henry’s supervisor, likes to tell a story about the large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion eutyphron). First recorded in 1795, it became extinct in the British Isles in 1979.

    More than a hundred years ago, conservationists erected fences around fields that housed the disappearing butterfly to keep out both butterfly hunters and cattle. But it turned out grazers were key to the butterfly’s survival, keeping grasses short so that ants could squirrel the caterpillars below ground for 10 months until the butterflies emerged. (Butterfly larvae look remarkably like ant larvae, so the ants carry them into their nests where the butterfly larvae feast on developing ants.) Over time, the fields became overgrown, the soil temperature dropped, and other ant species with no interest in the large blue moved in.

    Fencing off the fields “was exactly the wrong thing to do,” said Haddad, an ecologist at Michigan State University who studies wildlife corridors, butterflies, and bees. “The very acts of conservation were dooming butterflies.” Another large blue subspecies from Sweden has since been introduced in the UK—and cattle munching on grasses have contributed to their success.

    Now, after watching endangered butterfly populations dwindle and sometimes wink out, butterfly ecologists are finally getting a handle on what it takes to give a rare butterfly a leg up. Farming, urbanization, and forestry have carved up habitat, wiped out key plant species, and squelched natural disturbances like fire, flooding, and grazing, that help keep butterflies alive. And when isolated fragments of rare habitat sit adjacent to homes or schools—or on the edge of rapidly rising seas—the extinction risk only grows. Ecologists have discovered that by re-introducing this natural disturbance, often in combination with captive breeding programs, they can set butterflies on track to recovery.

    .::. Keep reading at bioGraphic.

  • Sea change

    Sea change

    The Arctic Ocean is beginning to look and act more like the Atlantic. It’s a shift that threatens to upend an entire food web built on frigid waters.

    On a cool morning in late July, the Oceania, a blue and white, three-masted research vessel, maneuvers through the dark waters of a fjord on the west coast of the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Craggy peaks streaked with snow rise sharply out of the water. Expansive sweeps of glacial ice plow between mountains and into the fjord, ending abruptly in towering turquoise walls. Chunks of ice drift by, sizzling and popping like sheets of bubble wrap as they melt and release air captured ages ago.

    As the ship sets anchor, scientists in wool sweaters, knit hats, rubber boots, and insulated marine jackets spill onto the deck and begin their work. One lowers a silver box of an instrument into the water to record its temperature, salinity, and depth. Another uses a winch to drop a cone-shaped net over the side of the ship to the seafloor. On its way back up, the fine mesh gathers a menagerie of tiny sea creatures, including krill, copepods, other tiny crustaceans, and a couple of grape-sized sea jellies.

    The copepods, tiny and transparent with slim red antennae, are the least beguiling of the hoard, but they are the main target. “We want to find out who they are, where they are, and how many of them there are,” says marine ecologist Sławomir Kwaśniewski who works at the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IO PAN) in Sopot, Poland. These minute crustaceans form the key middle links in a compressed Arctic food web: They are the primary food for Arctic cod, marine birds, and bowhead whales—and the energy and nutrients they contain help sustain seals, reindeer, and polar bears. By studying copepods, along with the Arctic ecosystem they support, from seafloor to bird-covered cliffs, the researchers hope to gain a better understanding of how climate change is restructuring that food web and changing the entire biological character of the Arctic.

    At its core, the scientists’ interest in the tiny copepods lies in a relatively recent phenomenon—one they’re calling the “Atlantification” of the Arctic. Years of sampling have shown that the Arctic Ocean is losing its distinctly Arctic traits and becoming increasingly more like the Atlantic. Its sea ice is melting, its water warming. In response, animals from warmer climes are encroaching, leading to a reorganization of its biodiversity. One particular copepod species is providing clues about the extent of the disruption and just how grave it might become.

    Keep reading this story at bioGraphic.

  • Nations put science before fishing in the Arctic

    Nations put science before fishing in the Arctic

    Nine nations and the European Union have reached a deal to place the central Arctic Ocean (CAO) off-limits to commercial fishers for at least the next 16 years. The pact, announced yesterday, will give scientists time to understand the region’s marine ecology—and the potential impacts of climate change—before fishing becomes widespread.

    “There is no other high seas area where we’ve decided to do the science first,” says Scott Highleyman, vice president of conservation policy and programs at the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C., who also served on the U.S. delegation to the negotiations. “It’s a great example of putting the precautionary principle into action.”

    The deal to protect 2.8 million square kilometers of international waters in the Arctic was reached after six meetings spread over 2 years. It includes not just nations with coastal claims in the Arctic, but nations such as China, Japan, and South Korea with fishing fleets interested in operating in the region.

    Thus far, thick ice and uncertain fish stocks have kept commercial fishing vessels out of the CAO, but the region is becoming increasingly accessible because of rapid loss of summer sea ice. In recent summers, as much as 40% of the CAO has been open water, mostly north of Alaska and Russia, over the Chukchi Plateau.

    As the summer sea ice becomes thinner and its edge retreats northward, more sunlight is penetrating the water, increasing production of plankton, the base of the Arctic food web. These sun-fed plankton are gobbled up by Arctic cod, which in turn are hunted by animals higher up the food chain, including seals, polar bears, and humans. Some parts of the Arctic Ocean’s adjacent seas, such as the Barents Sea (off the northern coasts of Russia and Norway), saw steep increases in primary production in 2016, approaching 35% above the 2003–15 average.

    .::. Keep reading this story in Science.