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Overview
Through extensive fieldwork and research the authors have produced a unique and authoritative reference. Detailed entries for each species include distribution and taxonomic information, status, habitat, and fossil history. Appendices include quick reference listings of mammal distribution by region, specimen locations, conservation status, and the incidence of Pleistocene mammals. The guide is generously illustrated with line drawings by Alaskan artist W. D. Berry and includes several maps indicating populations and locations of species.
Mammals of Alaska will be an accessible, easy to use source for scholars and hobbyists alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602230729 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2010 |
| Pages: | 399 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Stephen O. MacDonald is a curator II at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, mammals division. Joseph A. Cook is a professor at the University of New Mexico and a curator at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, mammals division.
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Recent Mammals of Alaska
By S. O. MacDonald Joseph A. Cook
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2009 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-072-9
Introduction
Mammals have long been important to Alaskans. From the earliest indigenous peoples who colonized this vast region tracking wildlife across the Bering Land Bridge, and the Russian colonists who were lured later by vast quantities of sea otter pelts, to the large-scale American whaling operations that followed several decades thereafter, mammals have played a key role in the exploration and colonization of Alaska. More recently, humans have been drawn to Alaska because it represents one of the last places on the planet to still experience wilderness and enjoy plentiful wildlife.In the future, informed decisions regarding human impact on natural environments will require a more detailed understanding of Alaska's biota. In particular, the impacts of global climate change, development of mineral and petroleum reserves, and deforestation of the boreal and coastal forests on these high-latitude ecosystems must be documented, monitored, and mitigated.
This catalog provides the first comprehensive overview of the 116 species of mammals that have been documented in Alaska and adjacent waters (Fig. 1) during the last ten thousand years. We summarize their taxonomy, distribution, status, habitat affinities, and fossil history. No similar reference has been available for mammals found in Alaska, although numerous research efforts have focused on specific components of the mammalian fauna.
William H. Dall, in 1870, was the first to publish a list of Alaska's mammals in his Alaska and Its Resources, followed three-quarters of a century later (in 1946) by Frank Dufresne's Alaska's Animals and Fishes.
The first synoptic treatment of mammals that included Alaska was Gerrit Miller's 1924 List of North American Recent Mammals, which was updated with coauthor Remington Kellogg in 1955. Not until 1959, however, when E. Raymond Hall and Keith R. Kelson published The Mammals of North America, was a single reference available that included all known Alaska taxa. That monograph also provided the first maps that defined the distributional boundaries of these species based on museum specimens. Hall updated that publication in 1981.
A book of regional importance, published by the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History in 1956, was Mammals of Northern Alaska on the Arctic Slope by James Bee and E. Raymond Hall. A useful, though limited, publication that appeared in 1965 was Distribution of Alaskan Mammals by Richard Manville and Stanley Young, and in 1973 and 1978 the Alaska Department Fish and Game published accounts with detailed maps of Alaska game species and their habitat.
Since Hall's 1981 publication, more than thirty taxonomic changes due to various revisions and a dozen new species have significantly altered our understanding of Alaska's mammalian fauna. Collaborations among state and federal agencies, bush communities, and university museums over the past two decades also created a wealth of new distributional and taxonomic information. Those efforts more than doubled the number of specimens and associated data that form the basis of this catalog of Alaska mammals.
These specimens are key to investigations aimed at documenting and exploring historic conditions of Alaska's environments (MacDonald and Cook 2007). By representing discrete slices of space and time across Alaska's biomes, archived specimens provide unique opportunities to apply established (e.g., morphology; Yom-Tov and Yom-Tov 2005) and new methods (e.g., stable isotope ecology; Hirons et al. 2001) to investigations aimed at assessing environmental change. Thus, natural history collections establish baselines and are becoming central to studies aimed at understanding the consequences of climate warming and other perturbations (May 1993; Millien et al. 2006; Suarez and Tsutsui 2004). Similarly, identifying and monitoring contaminants (Chapman 2005) or newly emerging pathogens (Brooks and Hoberg 2006; Kutz et al. 2004; Yates et al. 2002) can be facilitated by specimen collections (Fig. 2). High concentrations of persistent toxic substances in marine mammals include both naturally occurring toxicants, such as heavy metals, as well as the anthropogenic substances, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides. Marine mammals bioaccumulate contaminants due to their long life span, high position in food webs, and tendency to accumulate body fat. Tissue samples have become critical to efforts to monitor pollutants in real time (Hoekstra et al. 2005). Associated web-accessible electronic databases (http://www.arctos.database.museum) and rigorous curatorial standards provide a significant integrated resource for ecological, evolutionary, epidemiological, and toxicological research on boreal organisms (Graham et al. 2004).
Among the serious challenges now facing the scientific community is the need to effectively communicate and educate the general public about the implications of environmental change. Natural history museums provide an important portal through scholarly publications, exhibits, and the internet into the everyday work of scientists by helping to digest technical studies into terms more accessible by the lay public (Wake 1988). Due to increased specialization, scientists tend to work in ever-narrowing fields of research yet the most significant findings are often at the interface of distinct disciplines. With critical environmental issues now facing human societies, there is an urgent need for scientists such as systematists, toxicologists, molecular geneticists, ecologists, wildlife veterinarians, and emerging pathogen specialists to begin to interact, collaborate, and understand the diverse perspectives of each discipline (Fig. 3). Another challenge, therefore, involves the need to take holistic or multidisciplinary approaches when tackling complex environmental or emerging medical problems. Because a single specimen is often used in many different studies, museums have become key to efforts to bridge across discrete scientific disciplines. Diverse studies thus are tied immediately to the same organism, which represents a discrete data-collecting event in time and space. Interdisciplinary studies are one of the hallmarks of museums, and today numerous studies can be tied together through their uses of different materials archived from the same specimen and hence the same data-collecting event. Finally, by integrating ongoing policy, management, and research initiatives, museum collections are now vital to ongoing environmental investigations and resource management decisions in the North (Fig. 3). Challenges for museums include the need to sample regularly and archive material representative of biotic communities in ways that will be valuable to diverse investigations in the future. One example of an integrative effort is ongoing collaborations underway between mammalogists, parasitologists, and human disease specialists through the Beringian Coevolution Project.
A Brief History of Mammalogy and Mammal Collectors in Alaska
Numerous individuals supported by a diverse set of institutions (Fig. 3) have conducted field expeditions aimed at documenting the distribution and taxonomy of mammals in Alaska. We cover only the early expeditions that resulted in the exploratory efforts to document the diversity and distribution of mammals in Alaska in this brief synopsis. Mammalogy is a broad field and many productive mammalogists have investigated various aspects of mammalian biology in Alaska. Of particular note is work at the University of Alaska Fairbanks by comparative physiologists like Laurence Irving (e.g., Dawson 2007; Irving 1939), P. F. Scholander (Scholander et al. 1942), Brian Barnes (Barnes 1989), and ecologists Dave Klein (Klein 1968), John Bryant (Bryant et al. 1983), and Terry Bowyer (Bowyer et al. 1998). Similarly, agencies such as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, National Park Service, North Slope Borough Division of Wildlife Management, and, more recently, U.S. Geological Service have supported a number of investigations of mammals by individuals such as Edgar Bailey, Jim Brooks, Kathy Frost, Craig George, Loyal Johnson, Karl Kenyon, Charley Land, Cal Lensink, Jack Lentfer, Lloyd Lowry, Jim Rearden, Vic Scheffer, John Schoen, Sandy Talbot, and Olaf Wallmo, to name only a few. With regard to studies on the distribution and taxonomy of the mammals of Alaska, a primary publication outlet has been the (now defunct) North American Fauna series (Table 1).
Below we briefly summarize a few of the major contributors to our early knowledge on Alaska's mammals.
Early Explorations
The first naturalists of Alaska were the Native peoples who began colonizing the region from Asia at least thirteen thousand years ago. Oral traditions of these cultures have provided key insights into the ecology of high-latitude mammals (e.g., Huntington and Elliott 2002).
The first European contact with Alaska was much later, in 1741, during the Great Northern Expedition led by Vitus J. Bering and including naturalist Georg W. Steller (1709-1746). The expedition put briefly ashore on Kayak and Nagai islands, then shipwrecked on one of the Komandorski (Commander) Islands (Ostrov Beringa). A second ship that separated from Bering was commanded by Aleksei Chirikov and it sailed south to discover Alaska's panhandle.
Captain James Cook's (1728-1779) last voyage in 1778 and 1779 for Britain had no naturalist aboard, but his men did secure some specimens. This expedition visited Prince William Sound ("Sandwich Sound"), Unalaska, and St. Matthew Island. William Anderson, surgeon on the Resolution, kept a diary and made notes on the birds and mammals seen or collected.
Carl Heinrich Merck visited Kodiak Island in winter of 1789 through July 1790 as naturalist of the Billings Expedition.
Otto von Kotzebue (1787-1846) of the Russian Navy was accompanied by German naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso, who collected (mostly plants) in the Kotzebue Sound area and on St. Lawrence Island in 1816-1817.
Captain F. W. Beechey (1796-1856), commander of the second British ship, HMS Blossom, visited Kotzebue Sound and various points north to Barrow between 1825 and 1828. Mammals encountered were reported by John Richardson (1839).
Ilja G. Voznesenskii (1816-1876) collected mammals for the Russian Academy of Sciences (housed at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg) during the years 1840-1845 (Alekseev 1987). Specimen localities include Kodiak, Sitka, Saint Michael, Bristol Bay, St. Paul, and Kenai (A. Tsvetkova, pers. comm., 2007).
The U.S. Army Signal Corp and the Smithsonian Institution
American exploration began with naturalists attached to the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, beginning in 1865. Under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the Chicago Academy of Science, Major Robert Kennicott (1835-1866), with Charles Pease and H. M. Bannister, landed at St. Michael for the purpose of exploring the Yukon. In July 1866, William Healey Dall (1845-1927) traveled north to St. Michael and learned that Kennicott had died in Nulato. Dall was placed in charge of the scientific work and reached Nulato in December 1866. In the spring of 1867, Dall traveled as far east as Fort Yukon. On returning to the mouth of the Yukon River, he learned the enterprise had been abandoned. Instead of leaving with the others, he remained and finished the work before returning to the States in 1867. The specimens collected were divided between the U.S. National Museum (USNM, now known as the National Museum of Natural History) and the Chicago Academy of Sciences, with most of the latter material destroyed in the great Chicago fire. He published a report on Alaska, its resources, and his adventures (Dall 1870). Dall returned to Alaska for two seasons with the U.S. Coast Survey, 1871-1873, working in southwestern Alaska as far west as Attu.
Following Dall, the next significant information on mammals resulted from the activities of the U.S. Army Signal Corps as they established meteorological stations throughout Alaska. Some of these observers gathered specimens for the Smithsonian Institution, and especially noteworthy collectors were Lucien McShan Turner (1848-1909) and Edward William Nelson (1855-1934). Turner was a meteorologist stationed at St. Michael near Nome, but he was also under direction of Spencer Fullerton Baird, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Turner joined the Signal Corps and worked in Alaska until 1881, publishing his Contributions to the Natural History of Alaska in 1886. Turner was relieved by Private E. W. Nelson in 1877. Nelson spent over four years in the Arctic and later became an accomplished mammalogist. He was the third Chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. Nelson and Frederick W. True (1858-1914), first head curator of mammals at the USNM and a specialist in whales, published on the mammals of northern Alaska (Nelson and True 1887).
Henry Wood Elliott (1846-1930) studied northern fur seals on the Pribilof Islands in 1874 (Elliott 1896), and sailed north over 370 km to view the polar bears that live year-round on St. Matthew Island (Elliott 1881). Earlier reports "did not cause us to be equal to the sight we saw, for we met bears, yea hundreds of them." Elliott and his party surveyed the island for nine days and were never out of sight of bears. He estimated 250 to 300 bears.
Charles Leslie McKay (1855-1883), also of the Signal Corps, was stationed at Bristol Bay between 1881 and 1883. Frederick W. True provided an annotated list of the mammals collected by McKay from this area in 1886.
Leonhard Stejneger (1851-1943), eminent naturalist with a long interest in marine mammals, emigrated to the United States from Norway in 1881 to work for the Smithsonian. The year after his arrival he was sent to Bering Island, which stimulated a passionate interest in Georg Steller's earlier work (and the Steller's sea cow) that culminated in Stejneger's classic biography of Alaska's first naturalist (Stejneger 1936).
John Murdoch and A. M. Sergeant coauthored a report (in 1885) on the natural history, including mammals, of the International Polar Expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska (1881-1883), by the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
Edward A. McIlhenny (1872-1949), leader of the McIlhenny Expedition of 1897-1898, spent more than a year at Point Barrow. He also collected at Point Hope, Cape Lisburne, and Wainwright. This expedition was organized for the primary purpose of securing zoological material and was the first in Alaska with this specific objective. Specimens were deposited at the USNM and a summary of this expedition was published (Stone 1900).
The U.S. Biological Survey and the U.S. National Museum
The U.S. Biological Survey (USBS), beginning in the late 1890s, produced many new insights into Alaska's mammalian fauna through surveys conducted under the direction of Clinton Hart Merriam (1855-1942). Those surveys resulted in four important contributions to the North American Fauna series of the USBS based on new specimens from vast sections of the territory. Clark P. Streator (1866-1952) participated in the USBS survey in 1895, and his collecting at Yakutat Bay and various points in southeast Alaska provided the first scientific view of the mammals of these coastal sites. A few years later, the Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1899 included C. Hart Merriam and Albert Kenrick Fisher (1856-1948) of the USBS. Their itinerary included visits to Wrangell, Glacier Bay, Sitka, Yakutat Bay, Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, Kodiak Island, Kukak Bay, Unalaska, the Pribilofs, and St. Matthew and Hall islands.
Principal work of the USBS in Alaska was done under the leadership of Wilfred H. Osgood (1875-1947), who was with the USBS from 1897 to 1909 and was later curator at the Field Museum of Chicago. His first trip, in 1899 with Dr. Louis B. Bishop (and Alfred G. Maddren as assistant), covered the territory from Skagway to Whitehorse, then down the Yukon River to St. Michael (Osgood 1900). In 1900, Osgood (1901) visited Cook Inlet with Edmund Heller (1875-1939). They started at Seldovia and collected near Hope, Tyonek, and several other places. In 1902, Osgood's most extensive trip, again with Maddren as assistant and Walter Fleming as camp hand, started from the base of the Alaska Peninsula at Iliamna Bay on 10 July and ended at Cold Bay in late October (Osgood 1904). In 1903, Osgood and Ned Hollister (1876-1924) made a second trip into the Yukon, again taking a route from Skagway to Whitehorse, and then floating down to Circle and back to Eagle, where they packed into the Glacier Mountains (Osgood 1909). In 1904, Osgood worked in nearby Yukon Territory.
Olaus J. Murie (1889-1963) was a member of the U.S. Biological Survey and conducted mammalian research similar to that carried out by Osgood. Murie first arrived in the territory in 1920 and remained until 1926. After 1926, he studied Alaska mammals intermittently. Between 1920 and 1922, Murie traveled extensively throughout central Alaska, and in July of 1922 he worked with his brother Adolph in Mt. McKinley National Park. He later traveled north to the Kokrines, Melozitna, Alatna, and the upper Koyukuk, before crossing to the upper Chandalar and on to the Yukon. In 1924, Murie led a Biological Survey Expedition that worked in the Hooper Bay area of the Yukon Delta. This party included Herbert Brandt, H. B. Conover, and Frank Dufresne. In 1925, he explored the western portion of the Alaska Peninsula. Later that year, he went up the Porcupine River to the Old Crow River. His last extensive assignment was his classic survey of the Aleutian Islands in summers of 1936 and 1937 (Murie 1959).
Frank Dufresne (1896-1966), a member of the 1924 USBS expedition to Hooper Bay, helped shape the first comprehensive Alaska Game Act and subsequently served as the Director of the federal Alaska Game Commission. He published a popular book on selected mammals and fishes of Alaska in 1946.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
Introduction
Materials and Methods
The Recent Mammals of Alaska
Literature Cited
Appendices
Index