Climate Change

An insect infestation responsible for defoliating thousands of acres of the Tongass National Forest is abating.

Scientists with the Forest Service believe that the blackheaded budworm, whose numbers surged over the past three years, is now in decline.

And while it’s not clear how much lasting damage was done by the insect, there’s a good chance that some parts of the forest may emerge from the infestation better off.

KCAW caught up with Gordy Williams by cell phone while he was riding the state ferry LeConte from his home on Killisnoo Island in Angoon to Juneau in mid-July. It was a perfect day for a cruise up the Inside Passage, and a perfect day to see the widespread damage caused by the blackheaded budworm.

“You know, I’m looking at Chichagof and Baranof,” Williams said. “There are some pretty big impacts on the east side of these islands.”

That damage is acre upon acre of defoliated hemlock trees — wide swaths of brown striping the otherwise endless green of Southeast Alaska. The trees’ needles were consumed by tiny, voracious caterpillars fueling their transformation into budworm moths.

Williams worked for years in the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. He understands that budworms and their partner-in-crime, the hemlock sawfly, have a role in the forest. But this latest event he considers extreme. The Forest Service estimates 685,000 acres were defoliated by insects in the last three years.

“It’s a natural cycle, but when it does get ramped up like this, it does have a pretty, pretty significant effect on the ecosystem,” said Williams. “So what our curiosity is at this point, and our concern is: What are the impacts of this radically thinned-out forest canopy in so many areas? You know, that’s what provides winter cover for deer and other animals and is it going to impact stream temperatures, and that kind of thing?”

This part of Chatham Strait is notorious for winter storms – huge sou’easters that blow right up the channel between Admiralty and Baranof islands, and can make this ordinarily pleasant ferry ride a bit of a stomach-churner. Hemlock sawfly stressed these trees in 2018 and 2019. The blackheaded budworm infestation followed in 2020.

Forest Service entomologist Liz Graham described it as a one-two punch to the forest, putting it on the ropes. The weather may have finished the job.

“It definitely seems to be on some more extreme sites, too,” Graham said, “the ones that are really heavily exposed. And so I do think that it’s a little bit more like a compounding impact where there was heavy defoliation, and then maybe on top of that a big windstorm or ice storm, and that really kind of stripped the last of it. And so I do think that that’s why we have seen some of those areas with really more dense mortality — that there’s been more than one event there.”

Graham said that, depending on the area, up to half of the hemlock trees may have died. Although this sounds like a high toll, Graham’s colleague, silviculturist Molly Simonson, says on a forest-wide scale, the damage is limited. Most areas are unaffected. And some forest die-off is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Trees do die,” Simonson said, “whether it’s clusters of them during a particular event, or whether it’s just individually over the course of that forest’s development. But you know, it contributes to nutrient cycling within the ecosystem. And there’s always going to be other trees in the understory waiting to take over that space. There’s regeneration underneath those dominant trees that are just waiting to take over. And will capitalize on that.”

The last major blackheaded budworm infestation in the Tongass was in the 1950s, and good data is hard to come by. Liz Graham says tree ring studies could help her identify the timing of the budworm cycle, but humans are throwing new variables in the mix. Climate change — or specifically, the number of frost-free days — could play a role in outbreaks. But warmer weather can also disadvantage budworms.

“The budworm population actually extends all throughout the Pacific Northwest,” Graham said. “And so the outbreaks that we’ve been experiencing here have really just been happening in Southeast Alaska and haven’t extended to British Columbia. And so, based on some of the research we’ve been looking at, it might be actually too warm down there. So it could be that we’re in this perfect little climate window right now for budworm outbreaks.”

Although the outbreak in Southeast Alaska is subsiding, there are some areas where budworms are peaking – notably Juneau and Haines. Picture a slow-moving budworm tsunami that began on Prince of Wales Island, and traveled north. Defoliation is not certain death, however; trees that were stripped near Gordy Williams’ home on Killisnoo Island are sending out new buds this year, as are many along the route of the LeConte as it steams up Chatham Strait.

“And we’ll just have to see how many of those trees can come back and how long it takes,” said Williams.

From shuttle buses to whale watching catamarans, tourism in Southeast Alaska largely runs on diesel. That means each tour releases greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. 

To counteract that, Sitka-based Allen Marine Tours launched a new partnership with Renewable Juneau’s Carbon Offset Fund last month. The goal is to pay for heat pumps in the communities where Allen Marine operates.

Electric heat pumps help homeowners swap fossil fuel for renewable energy. To spread heat pumps across the region, Allen Marine is collecting small donations from thousands of visitors that pass through Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan on their whale watching and glacier tours each year.

Allen Marine’s Director of Guest Experience Caitlyn Ellis says they hope the program will eventually generate thousands of dollars in donations. 

“That’s a lot of heat pumps. That is a big chunk of our community that could reassess how our buildings are heated in a sustainable and renewable way,” Ellis said. 

Allen Marine is one of the region’s largest tour companies, with hundreds of boat tours throughout Southeast Alaska each season. And they’re one of the largest tour companies in the region to adopt a carbon offset program. 

Carbon offset is the idea that a person or company can make up for their CO2 emissions in one area by paying to reduce emissions elsewhere. In this case, heat pumps run on renewable hydroelectricity instead of heating oil. So installing them cuts down on the use of fossil fuel in local homes to make up for the fossil fuel burned by Allen Marine tours. 

Carbon offset programs like the one at Juneau Carbon Offset put a price on carbon emissions. Though it isn’t an exact science, the goal is to figure out how much money is needed to eliminate a unit of CO2 from the atmosphere. For Allen Marine, that’s about $2 per visitor. 

“So, if every person donated $2, it would make up for the carbon footprint on board,” Ellis said. 

All visitor donations up to $25,000 will then be matched by Allen Marine. But despite the program’s lofty goals, it’s only raised about $3,000 since it launched last month. That’s because not every visitor makes a donation. 

The money is collected two ways. The first is an “opt-out” program. For independent travelers who book online, the donation is the default option at check-out. 

The second option happens on board. On every Allen Marine boat, there’s a kiosk with a local snack selection and complimentary coffee. There’s a small poster there that reads “Ready to reduce your carbon impact?”

“It’s kind of similar to a grocery store round up,” Ellis said. 

But instead of donating to a food pantry or an animal shelter, visitors donate to Juneau Carbon Offset, a program of Renewable Juneau that focuses on funding heat pumps for low income families. 

In the short time that the program has been up and running, the opt-out approach is bringing in more money. But the vast majority of tourists don’t book independently. Instead, they book through cruise lines. That means much of the program’s success will rely on their on board advertising. 

And for Allen Marine, the new challenge is bringing up climate change and greenhouse emissions without negatively impacting guest experiences.

“We don’t want to overwhelm them with information while they’re having a great time,” Ellis said. 

For some tour guides, talking to guests about the price of fuel, rather than emissions, feels more effective.  

“We’re in communities where all of our fuel gets shipped in,” Ellis said. “And that is something that a guest can understand.”

Ellis said marketing for the program will be refined during recruitment and training for tour guides in future years. And Allen Marine hopes to pursue negotiations with cruise lines to expand their opt-out donation approach.

Though money is trickling in so far, Ellis said the company is confident that they’ll be able to front the cost of at least one heat pump – about $7,000 — this year.

 

Eric Jordan’s life on the ocean began more than 70 years ago, when his parents started taking him out on the family’s troller. At 73, Jordan still fishes regularly. But he says a lot has changed in the waters of Southeast Alaska.

“I was out there, the last two weekends at the Derby weigh station, seeing things that are truly dystopian. The lack of birds, the lack of fish,” Jordan said. “Those of us who are out there on the water, we are seeing the changes. And I’ll tell you it’s pretty spooky.” 

Jordan started his own operation in 1978, trolling for coho and chinook salmon across Southeast Alaska and catching hundreds of fish a day. But today, the marine environment seems less abundant. Most species of Southeast salmon have had record low harvests in recent years, and the devastation from “the Blob” — a Pacific heat wave that caused massive die-offs of marine species — lingers. 

Scientists expect a future with warmer oceans and more marine heat waves. But there’s a lack of data to explain how climate change is shaping Southeast fisheries. Now, two new citizen science projects from Alaska Sea Grant and the Alaska Trollers Association will help longtime troll fishermen like Jordan take the lead to gather data about how the waters they depend on are changing. 

Checking the ocean’s pulse

Tyler Hennon, an oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, describes temperature and salinity as foundational to most research in the marine environment. 

“I kind of think of it as the heartbeat of the ocean,” Hennon said.  “If you don’t know the temperature and salinity, you don’t know much of anything.”

Knowing temperature and salinity is important because they shape ocean mixing, a natural process where warmer surface water mixes with cold, nutrient-rich water from further down in the water column. That process triggers spring phytoplankton blooms.

“Which of course, are the base of the food chain,” Hennon said. “They set off all the production for all the higher trophic levels and fishing and all the things that we love in Southeast Alaska.”

To know what salmon and other marine animals are eating — and when they’re not getting enough to eat — scientists need information on temperature and salinity. But there are major data gaps in central Southeast Alaska, especially in the summer months.

To fill those gaps, Hennon’s project relies on the people who are already out on the water — fishermen who will take regular measurements at different depths near their fishing grounds using electronic sensors on their fishing lines.

The data they gather will provide a baseline for biologists and oceanographers as climate change continues to shape the Gulf of Alaska. That’s crucial for determining what marine conditions that are “normal,” as opposed to conditions that might be caused by climate change.   

Sitka fisherman Jim Moore, who serves on the Alaska Trollers Association board, says the data will also help fishermen make sense of decades of observations out on the water. 

“People talk about ‘Oh, my goodness, I’ve never seen that before.’ Well, I’ve been fishing for 53 years. I saw that back in 1979,” Moore said. “The long-term data set is what’s really valuable.” 

An old salmon counting program, rebooted

Moore is no stranger to doing science from a troll boat. As a commercial troll fisherman back in the 1970s, he participated in a logbook program where fishermen studied salmon populations in the Gulf of Alaska. 

That program ended in the early ’90s. But this spring, Moore and a select group of Southeast troll fishermen relaunched the program electronically. Using a tablet-based logbook, fishermen will record things like the species and quantity of salmon they’re catching, where they catch them, the size of the fish and their stomach contents.

The earlier logbook program informed major management decisions for Pacific salmon stocks, including the development of the Pacific Salmon Treaty in 1985. Moore said he hopes reviving the program will give fisheries managers more data to inform salmon conservation under climate change. 

Management of Southeast salmon fisheries was the center of a legal battle this spring, after a federal judge ordered the closure of the Southeast chinook fishery. Last week, a higher court ruled that the fishery could remain open this summer. 

Moore said the new logbook program could give fishermen a more solid legal defense against future lawsuits.

“Fishermen are natural scientists,” Moore said. “And the trust built between management and scientists and the fisherman is a good thing. We’re all working on it together.”

Jordan— who’s piloting the logbook program this summer — said collaborating with scientists is a long game for fishermen.   

“Trollers have a long history of standing up for salmon. And we are going to do that,” Jordan said. 

With science, Southeast troll fishermen can further solidify their role as environmental stewards, while building common ground with researchers and wildlife managers. 

 

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Eric Jordan’s last name. 

If there’s one kind of weather extreme that scientists clearly link to climate change, it’s worsening heat waves.

“They are getting hotter,” says Kai Kornhuber, adjunct scientist at Columbia University and scientist at Climate Analytics, a climate think tank. “They are occurring at a higher frequency, so that also increases the likelihood of sequential heat waves.”

In Texas, the Southern U.S. and Mexico, a three-week heat wave has gripped the region with temperature records falling for days in a row. Extreme heat has also hit India, China and Canada, where widespread wildfires are burning.

“Most of the world’s population has experienced record-breaking heat in recent days,” says Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the University of California-Los Angeles.

This year, something else is adding fuel to the fire: the El Niño climate pattern. That seasonal shift makes global temperatures warmer, which could make 2023 the hottest year ever recorded.

Longer heat waves are more dangerous

Heat waves are already the deadliest weather-related disaster in the U.S. Not only do extreme temperatures cause heat exhaustion and severe dehydration, it also raises the risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Those risks are even higher in neighborhoods that are lower-income and communities of color, where research has found temperatures are hotter than in white neighborhoods.

Temperatures in the weather report also don’t tell the whole story about the danger. With higher humidity, the toll that heat takes on the human body is much more taxing. Weather forecasters try to capture that with a heat index warning, which shows what the temperature actually feels like. But that’s only calculated for someone sitting in the shade, underestimating the risk for outdoor workers and others in the sun.

In recent years, scientists have done rapid assessments to determine how heat waves are being influenced by climate change. In several, they found the extreme temperatures were nearly impossible without climate change, like in the Mediterranean in April, in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, and in the United Kingdom in 2022.

El Niño is the exclamation point

This year, the planet also made a seasonal shift to an El Niño pattern. It starts when the ocean in the central and eastern Pacific warms up. That extra heat alters weather patterns, raising the temperatures globally.

“That’s its role in the global climate system – is moving some of the energy up from depth and dumping it into the atmosphere,” Swain says.

With El Niño just getting started this year, it’s likely the full effect isn’t being felt yet in heat waves or rainfall patterns. Typically, the Southern U.S. gets wetter and the Northern U.S. gets drier.

“That lag is because it takes some time for that extra heat near the surface of the ocean to actually make it into the atmosphere and be moved around by wind currents,” Swain says.

Climate experts say signs point to a strong El Niño this year, which could break global temperature records. The past 8 years have already been the hottest since record-keeping began, and 2016, the hottest ever recorded, was also a year with a powerful El Niño.

“Even if it’s not going to be the hottest on record, we’re certainly seeing the warmest decade so far,” Kornhuber says. “That alone should already be worrying enough.”

If the world continues emitting fossil fuels, these kinds of heat events are expected to become far more likely. Even if the world can meet its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), extreme heat waves still are likely to be more than eight times more common than they once were.

“The long-term driver is human-caused climate change where we’re sort of stair-stepping up along that inexorable upward trend,” Swain says. “El Nino represents the exclamation point on that trend.”

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While many Bering Sea crab populations are in freefall, Dungeness crab is breaking records in regions that hardly used to see them.

The North Peninsula District in the eastern Bering Sea opened as a commercial Dungeness fishery in the early ‘90s. In those early days, it was common for just one or two boats to fish there — many seasons, there were none.

The numbers increased modestly over the ensuing decades — but that growth has recently become exponential.

“The pots that we’re seeing coming out of this fishery are absolutely stuffed with crab,” said Ethan Nichols, who works for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Like, you don’t even know how many crabs can fit in a pot.”

Nichols is Fish and Game’s assistant area manager for groundfish and shellfish in Dutch Harbor. He said the fishery boomed last year and became the largest Dungeness crab fishery in Alaska — bringing in 35% of the state’s total Dungeness landings.

So why are populations of this one particular species increasing, while red king crab and snow crab are decreasing?

The answer may be the same for both questions: climate change.

“We think it’s likely that the recent warming conditions in the Bering Sea are creating conditions more favorable for Dungeness crab,” Nichols said.

The same warming trend that is likely pushing king crab farther north could be bringing Dungeness crab to the eastern Bering Sea. But Nichols said the trend is too new to have any definitive answer.

“I’m hoping that as we have more years of consistent harvest in the fishery, we’ll have a better idea of the full distribution of crab in the area,” he said. “And if this is just a fluke for a couple of seasons, or if this can be a more consistently large Dungeness fishery.”

What is certain is that crabbers have taken notice. Last year, the fleet harvested 3 million pounds of Dungeness crab, breaking the highest record in the district.

That boom has some people concerned. In January, an Unalaska fisherman introduced an emergency proposal to ADF&G, warning that the sudden increase in vessel participation could lead to over-harvesting.

“The person who put this in was worried about some really big boats coming out from down south with like 3,000 pots apiece,” Nichols said.

In response, the department set a Dungeness pot limit — the first time they had ever done so in the district. The regulation limits pots to 500 or 750 per vessel, depending on how many boats have registered. This year, it’s 500.

The department said this season is starting slower than last year, with around 33,000 pounds of Dungeness crab caught since opening May 1.

The fishery will remain open until October 18, or until pot limits are met.

More than 2,000 ticks collected over a decade in Alaska revealed a pattern: New tick species are being introduced to the state, often through dogs traveling from the south. They’re joining the handful of tick species endemic to the state, which are usually found on small mammals like rabbits.

The results are detailed in a new bulletin released by the Alaska Division of Public Health’s epidemiology section. While several non-native tick species that can spread disease have been imported to Alaska, none have yet established permanent populations in the state, the bulletin said. But the numbers show that “ongoing tick surveillance is critical for monitoring this dynamic situation,” said the bulletin, authored by Micah Hahn, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Most of the study’s data comes from a program called Submit-A-Tick, a joint project of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s Office of the State Veterinarian, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the University of Alaska. Through it, members of the public send ticks they find to the state veterinarian’s office.

Hahn, who works at UAA’s Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies and has become one of Alaska’s top tick experts, lead a project in Anchorage-area and Kenai Peninsula parks that used drag cloths and, at some sites, live-trapping of small mammals to find ticks in the wild. That data supplemented the records of ticks submitted from 2010 to 2022 by the public and veterinarians.

Pets have been the most common place for the discovery of ticks in Alaska, followed by wild animals, the bulletin said.

The imported ticks were largely the brown dog tick, with the scientific name Rhipicephalus sanguineus, which is the most widespread tick in the world, and the American dog tick, with the scientific name Dermacentor variabilis, that is also widespread. About half of the non-native ticks tracked through the Submit-A-Tick program were found on hosts — domestic animals or even people — who had traveled outside of Alaska in the prior two weeks. Some sources of introduction were unknown, however.

Of growing concern is the western black-legged tick, with the scientific name Ixodes pacificus, which is known to spread Lyme disease. A few specimens have been found through the Submit-A-Tick program, and the Alaska climate is becoming more hospitable to it. A recent UAA study coauthored by Hahn found that Southeast Alaska and parts of Southcentral Alaska already have conditions that would support the establishment of this tick species, and more areas of the state are expected to become suitable in the future.

The biggest year for tick reporting was four years ago, when there was a lot of publicity about the Submit-A-Tick program, Hahn said. The record-hot summer that year might have also played a role in the reporting, she said.

“I think that the bump in tick submissions in 2019 was related to outreach about the program that kicked off that year. But definitely weather plays a role because when it’s nice outside, people and pets are more likely to get outside and go hiking and encounter ticks,” she said by email.

Of the six species of ticks considered native to Alaska, five of those were found through the Submit-A-Tick program. Those ticks are known to infest small mammals like rabbits, squirrels and voles and are considered a low risk to humans. They can spread diseases in the wild population; one is tularemia, sometimes called “rabbit fever,” which can be acquired by pet dogs and cats – and, occasionally, people — that have contact with infested rabbits or other mammals. In recent years, signs of tularemia exposure have shown up among polar bears and other Arctic animals.

Additionally, Hahn and her colleagues conducted surveys in 2021 of veterinary clinics to see what staff members and pet owners knew about ticks. Participants knew about the Submit-A-Tick program, but there were otherwise some lapses in awareness or tick-safety practices, the survey found.

“Ticks are a dynamic situation in Alaska so for people who grew up here or for vets who have practiced in Alaska for a long time, it’s probably not something that they’ve ever thought about or had to deal with. As things are changing in Alaska, it is important for vets and pet owners to keep up to date with the latest information,” Hahn said by email.

Over the longer term, reports of ticks in Alaska have increased dramatically, according to Hahn’s research. From 1909 to 2019, there were 1,190 tick records in Alaska representing 4,588 individual ticks across 15 species, according to a previous study authored by Hahn, published in 2020. Most of those ticks were of the six species historically found in Alaska: Haemaphysalis leporispalustris, Ixodes angustus, Ixodes auritulus, Ixodes howelli, Ixodes signatus, and Ixodes uriae. However, over half of the tick records were collected in the last 10 years of that study period, she and her colleagues found.

Yet to be spotted in Alaska is one type of tick that is of most concern to some people: the moose-attacking winter tick. That tick, with the species name Dermacentor albipictus, has become notorious in New England and parts of Canada for impacts to moose.

They have been established for years just over Alaska’s eastern border. Climate change has contributed to the spread of winter ticks west and north.

For infested moose that scratch off their hair and appear white, there’s a commonly used term: ghost moose. The blood-sucking winter ticks degrade the health of moose, increasing physical stress and hampering their ability to forage for food. For moose calves, infestations can be fatal.

In Maine, for example, winter-tick infestations – which are increasing as the climate warms – are now the leading cause of moose calf deaths, according to that state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. A department study of collared animals found that nearly 90% of the moose calves had died by the spring of 2022 after being infested with ticks. And a 2019 study cited tick-caused calf deaths as the reason for the overall moose population decline in northern New Hampshire and western Maine.

The winter tick was first discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory in the 1990s. They have been found on animals within two Yukon elk herds, on moose and deer. Winter ticks have also been found on moose and caribou in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.