Wildlife

Last October, research biologist Tony Fischbach made a startling discovery. Using satellite imagery, Fischbach and his team counted 200,000 Pacific walruses on one Russian beach at Cape Serdtse­-Kamen’, bordering the Chukchi Sea.

It suggests that the most recent population estimate, which measured about 260,000 Pacific walrus in the world, may have been an undercount.

A year ago, Fischbach would have been able to quickly confirm the finding with his Russian colleagues. But since the U.S. severed many research ties with Russia at the start of the Ukraine invasion, he doesn’t know when that will happen.

Fischbach studies walrus populations for the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal agency that studies natural resources and the hazards that threaten them.

For decades, stretching back to the Cold War, Russian and American scientists have been close partners on Pacific walrus research. U.S. and Soviet researchers began flying joint aerial surveys to count the animals in 1975.

“Even during my career — almost 30 years — there are people I’ve worked with the entire time,” said Fischbach. “They’ve been on ships with us shoulder to shoulder working closely together. We gathered data together, we published it together, that’s been our tradition.”

Walrus are an important subsistence animal for coastal Bering Sea communities. But as climate change speeds sea ice loss, the habitats and migration patterns of these massive marine mammals are changing in new and unpredictable ways.

But walrus don’t recognize international borders. And after Fischbach and his American colleagues made their exciting population discovery last year, it’s been hard to move the research forward without Russian input.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the U.S. imposed sanctions and began to cut off government funding and research relationships with Russian government-affiliated research institutions.

As a result, Fischbach, a federal employee, has had no communication  with his colleagues across the Bering Strait.

“We don’t want them to be put in any danger for communicating with Americans. And due to our sanctions, we also need to step back and not have direct communication,” he said.

There is a caveat to the count that Fischbach needs his Russian colleagues to clear up. The 200,000 estimate relied on walrus density measurements made in Alaska — that is, how closely the walrus pack together when they haul out on shore.

Fischbach said they won’t know their measurement is correct until Russian scientists publish their own density data and confirm Fischbach’s team accurately interpreted the satellite images.

“Our approach is to continue doing what we can and hope that they can do what they can,” Fischbach said. “We’ll publish our findings and our data. They can access that, they can publish their findings and their data. And we can move our science forward.”

This new format for scientific progress is like playing a long-distance game of telephone through formally published findings.

The strained relationship between Russia and the U.S. has also slowed research at the university level.

Vladimir Romanovsky, a Russian-born permafrost scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said increased tension with the outside world has made it riskier for Russian scientists to work with foreign agencies. It’s a tricky path to navigate, he said, because the government also wants international recognition for their science.

“On the one hand, they push [Russian scientists] to work with Western scientists and publish in Western literature. But on the other hand, if you’re doing it, you always have a chance to get in trouble,” Romanovsky said. “That’s Russia.”

Romanovsky said Russian scientists who accept funding from abroad also risk being labeled a “foreign agent” by their government.

“Which is very serious in Russia. You can go to jail for that,” Romanovsky said.

Universities aren’t subject to the same sanctions that federal agencies like USGS are, so Romanovsky can still communicate virtually with his Russian colleagues. But meeting in person has proved difficult as the international scientific community has moved to exclude Russia from conferences in the last year.

Romanovsky said while it’s still possible to continue ongoing projects with his Russian colleagues, starting any new collaborations will be difficult.

“It’s hurting, not immediate right now. But [in] the future, definitely, there is much more problems with the future,” he said.

Romanovsky wants to bring some of his colleagues to Alaska for a research visit in the fall, but he said getting them visas will be nearly impossible.

Meanwhile Fischbach is waiting to see if his Russian colleagues confirm the giant walrus count with their own scientific paper. There’s no way to know when the publication is coming, but he said he trusts they’re working on it.

Be careful what you say, ravens. Doug Wacker is listening to you.

Wacker studies animal behavior at the University of Washington Bothell. Since August 2022, he has been in Fairbanks, following ravens. When he hears them vocalizing, Wacker points at the big, black birds with a microphone attached to a plastic dish that resembles a giant contact lens.

Wacker is recording as much raven talk as he can in Fairbanks. He wants to find meaning, if any, in the squawks, rattles and water-droplet/computer sounds that so often come from those black beaks.

Many of Wacker’s recordings are the voices of members of the greatest local congregation of ravens he has found so far — at the Fairbanks dump.

“I never thought I would go do an academic sabbatical in a landfill,” Wacker said during a recent presentation.

Wacker wonders if there is any pattern in the array of sounds that come from a raven’s mouth. Over the years, researchers have identified up to 116 different vocalizations from ravens.

Though scientists who study ravens have debated that number, William Boarman and Bernd Heinrich described a few types of specific calls in a raven description they wrote for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of North America. The distinct calls were begging, vocal play, predatory alarms, demonstrative calls, knocking, comfort sounds, chase calls and mimicry.

Wacker is now recording the sounds of ravens (and their present cohorts bald eagles) at the Fairbanks landfill 24 hours a day. He is also recording at many other places opportunistically.

Wacker wants to further decode raven calls using machine learning, which he describes as using a computer to look for patterns.

He said humans are biased in their descriptions of sounds, noting that scientists have described the same call ravens use to announce they have found food as an aw, a kow, a ky and as a yell.

“We’re all calling the same call something different,” Wacker said.

He looks at raven calls with spectrograms — visual displays with colored peaks and valleys that spill over his computer screen. These allow him to compare the sounds using his eyes as well as his ears. For example, he can measure with precision the length of a raven’s call and the time between syllables.

He hopes that as he uploads snippets of Fairbanks raven chatter, the machine-learning computer will separate raven calls into categories he would not have come up with himself.

For now, Wacker taps his brake and steps outside his car near Wendy’s, where he records ravens talking over the traffic on Airport Way.

With the help of artificial intelligence, he might gather enough raven talk during his sabbatical year to help us humans come up with a better idea of how our dumpster companions are communicating.

Which raises a question: Do we really want to know what ravens are saying about us?

On a tiny, remote island in Southeast Alaska, scientists recently made a surprising discovery: Wolves are eating sea otters.

And not just one every so often. For this pack, it’s the wolves’ main source of food. The study is making waves in the scientific community.

Pleasant Island is about a mile south of the mainland, near the town of Gustavus. Historically, wolves would occasionally swim over but had never colonized the island until about a decade ago.

“This pack of wolves really defied all of our predictions,” said Gretchen Roffler, who has studied wolves in Southeast for eight years.

Roffler is the lead author of a study published in January in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences on the island’s wolves. This new pack killed all the black-tailed deer on the island — a favorite meal for Southeast wolves. They’re a territorial species, and an established pack was back on the mainland preventing a return. Roffler and other scientists assumed they would die off from starvation.

“Instead, what we found was that the wolves stayed on the island, and they continued to reproduce annually,” Roffler said.

But how? The island is small, just over 20 square miles. What were the wolves eating?

Nearby residents in Gustavus noticed new wolf activity on the island, where they would hunt deer and pick berries. Greg Streveler is one of them, and his first thought was, “Uh-Oh.”

Streveler is a retired ecologist with the National Parks Service and has studied the area’s land and animals for over 50 years.

“The ‘Uh-Oh’ was, you can see what’s coming,” he said. “Having the pack discover the place. And [then] there was two wolves instead of one. You could kind of read the tea leaves.”

Within a few years, Streveler and other residents saw the island’s deer disappear. So the scientists stepped in and began to gather data. In 2015, they counted three wolves. A year later there were 10. By the year 2017, there were 13 wolves.

“The wolf densities on this island at this time were some of the highest ever recorded,” Roffler said.

Roffler’s team collected scat and studied it in a lab to see what the wolves were eating. And it showed something surprising: sea otter.

“At first, I thought, well, this is maybe just a blip,” said Roffler. “Maybe this is just an occasional thing that wolves are able to do.”

They decided to collect wolf hair. While scat shows what wolves have eaten recently, hair gives scientists a longer-term look. And tests on the hair proved it wasn’t a blip. The wolves were eating lots of sea otters and had been for a while. Roffler said it underscores how adaptable wolves are.

“Something that we assume about wolves is that they really can’t live without ungulate prey,” she said. “They very quickly switched to a diet that primarily consists of sea otters. It really just took a couple of years for that to happen.”

Starting in 2020, Roffler’s team GPS-collared some of the wolves so they could study so-called “kill sites,” where the wolves likely feasted for a while. They noticed the wolves were traveling around the circular island, along the tideline.

“When we look at all the wolf GPS location data, if we just splashed onto a map, it sort of looks like a doughnut,” Roffler said.

Sea otters might look cute — maybe you’ve seen photos of them floating on their backs and holding hands — but they aren’t small or defenseless. They have sharp teeth for cracking shellfish to eat and males can grow to 100 pounds. Based on the kill sites, the scientists believe the wolves are targeting otters at low tide when they’re on land or in the shallows and they’re more vulnerable.

Roffler hasn’t witnessed the pack hunt and is hesitant to speculate about it. But Streveler has a theory.

“The wolves are not dealing with a healthy group of otters,” he said. “So I don’t think it’s a big deal for wolves to find some.”

He says the otters in the area might be weak and are hauling out on land more than normal. Sea otters were introduced to the region in the 1960s after being hunted to near extinction. Streveler said it’s possible that there are more otters in the area than the habitat can support.

“Before, nobody here ever saw an otter haul out. Ever,” Streveler said. “And so, to find a naive group of very easy to catch, very, very delicious critters. Oh, my God, you know, it’s like discovering the Garden of Eden.”

Scientists don’t know how this unusual diet might affect wolves in the long term. Roffler said that’s their next big question — how contaminants accumulate in the food web.

“Wolves are apex predators, and sea otters are apex nearshore predators,” she said. “So any sort of contaminants in the environment, if they’re being consumed by sea otters, or by sea otter prey, they would bioaccumulate in wolves. So this is something we’re trying to study more.”

They also don’t know how long the food source will be around. But Streveler thinks it’s temporary.

“The sea otter-wolf thing is probably a flash in the pan,” he said. “It’s not likely there’s going to be both a lot of sea otters and a lot of weak sea otters available very long. It’s a very, very brief, I think, opportunistic window.”

Besides the future of this wolf pack, the implications of the study are turning some corners of the science world upside-down. In a commentary, Princeton University Ecology professor Robert Pringle says the conclusions “challenge dogma.” New ways of gathering data are debunking “grand theoretical generalizations.” He writes, “One thing it needs now is a rejuvenated commitment to figuring out what is what in the real world.”

Juneau’s Mendenhall Wetlands make up the third largest tidal salt marsh area in Southeast Alaska. The wetlands are considered key habitat for hundreds of species of shorebirds and migratory waterfowl, and an essential spawning ground for salmon and other fish.

“It’s an extraordinarily important piece of habitat that we often take for granted,” said Matt Robus, a longtime Juneau resident and retired director of wildlife conservation for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Because it’s right in the middle of our town.” 

Now, scientists and local conservation groups are raising concerns about possible threats to the wetlands from the long-discussed second crossing to Douglas Island. A study for the project outlined eight possible locations for the crossing, and half of them pass through the Mendenhall Wetlands State Game Refuge. 

The second crossing has garnered widespread community support, but Robus says he’s been unhappy with route planning so far. 

“There has not been, in this first stage of the process, a lot of display or consideration of these biological values,” he said.

Robus belongs to a new Mendenhall Wetlands study group, made up of about 20 local scientists and naturalists. The group aims to protect the wetlands, which have already lost around 40% of their original expanse, from further development. 

“There’s already pressure on this habitat, and there aren’t other habitats around like it to replace it,” Robus said. “Our concern is that it really shouldn’t be subjected to another significant negative impact. And these crossings have at least the potential to do that.” 

Some of the possible crossing locations could reverse mitigation efforts tied to existing development around the wetlands. The Southeast Alaska Land Trust owns more than a dozen parcels of wetlands that were conserved to offset the airport expansion. Two of the proposed alternatives either border those parcels or cut through them. 

Krista Garret, the land trust’s conservation director, says they’re not opposed to the idea of a second crossing, but they believe it’s possible to build a route that won’t disturb the wetlands.

“As the study moves forward, we encourage a focus on alternatives that are outside of the refuge boundaries,” she said.

The existing alternatives provide three options further out in Gastineau Channel, closer to the existing Douglas Bridge. Those routes would avoid the refuge.

An infusion of federal money and an omnibus spending package approved earlier this month will fund further studies on the possible environmental impacts, as well some of the project’s preliminary engineering.

From there, the preliminary study will continue to narrow down alternatives, with a final recommendation sometime next year. If the city decides to proceed with crossing, those recommended routes would go through a more robust environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The public comment period for the preliminary crossing alternatives ends Feb. 3. Comments can be submitted online.

Last week, the refrigerated egg section of Homer’s Save-U-More grocery store was lit, but completely bare. Sitting in the deli, manager Mark Hemstreet described a situation that is becoming familiar around Alaska — there simply aren’t any eggs. It’s the result of a nationwide outbreak of avian influenza.

Cases began surfacing in the United States in March of last year, and have since impacted nearly every state. Over 52 million domestic birds have died or been culled to try and stem the spread of this highly contagious strain, known as H5N1.

There are many different strains of avian influenza, which experts categorize as either low or highly pathogenic, reflecting the severity of symptoms. A low pathogenic avian flu virus generally causes mild to no symptoms, while highly pathogenic strains can cause severe illness and death — especially in domestic poultry.

Hemstreet said Save-U-More’s two main egg suppliers are Costco and SuperValu. Both companies primarily source their eggs from Washington State, which saw an uptick in highly pathogenic avian flu cases in December and January, straining supply chains. The disease has impacted both small backyard flocks and commercial-scale operations like Oakdell Egg Farms, which recently had to cull more than a million birds.

Like many stores around Alaska, Costco has restricted the number of eggs shoppers can purchase — when they are even available to purchase. Hemstreet said Save-U-More can only buy a limited number of cartons, same as any other customer.

“We used to get about a pallet, four or five feet high, of eggs three times a week. And now [all] they’ll give us — if they’re available — is two packages of each variety,” he said.

When they are able to order eggs, Hemstreet said the costs have gone up too. “The SuperValu supplier has increased their costs, so we’ve had to match it here.”

Nationally, egg prices have gone up 60%.

Amber Betts, spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Agriculture, said farmers have learned a lot since the 2014-2015 outbreak of avian flu, the last major epidemic in American poultry. Betts said those cases were often sparked by contaminated equipment or people moving between infected farms.

This time, the main way the H5N1 virus is spreading in Washington is through interactions with wild birds, which can carry the virus without showing symptoms. That makes the disease incredibly hard to control, Betts said.

Currently, Washington is reporting new incidents every couple of weeks, down from several a day at its peak last summer. But that offers little consolation for those who have had to euthanize their flocks.

“It’s devastating, just all around. It’s devastating for the flock owners, it’s devastating for our veterinarians, and it’s just a taxing virus for everyone, including the bird,” Betts said.

One of the best ways to protect birds is to keep them indoors, which can be a costly challenge for farmers, and uncomfortable for the poultry. H5N1 is highly contagious, and can spread through exposure to infected surfaces, as well as through things like ponds and food sources that might be shared with wild bird species.

That has major implications for Alaska. State Veterinarian Bob Gerlach said that there have only been five flocks reported as infected so far, but added that this is “probably a long-term problem that we’re going to be dealing with.”

With the seasonal migration of millions of wild birds just around the corner, Gerlach said a collaboration of state and federal agencies are watching to see how avian influenza is behaving in the Lower 48 and South America.

“There’s a lot of these high pathogen influenzas out there,” Gerlach said. “Wild birds are just one of the transport mechanisms, and they’re the ones that we don’t have any control of.”

While Alaskan poultry haven’t been hit hard yet, the state has tracked infections and mortality in shorebirds and raptors from the Southeast to the North Slope. Birds are more susceptible to avian influenza when under strain from other factors. Climate change is altering the timing of food availability for some migrating birds, making understanding environmental stressors along their difficult journeys even more important.

Avian flu is just one pathogen that migrating birds can carry, and a warming Arctic is increasing the risk that other parasites, like Asian longhorn and moose winter ticks, could find a hold in Alaska, Gerlach added.

“The health of the animal can impact the health of the environment, and the health of the environment and the animal can impact public health. So it’s all interconnected,” he said.

The idea is slowly taking hold that scientific research should look at the impacts of specific events — like outbreaks of avian flu — on an ecosystem-level.

Falk Huettmann, professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said a big-picture approach is an absolute necessity. In his opinion, focusing primarily on mortality in poultry leaves glaring gaps in understanding how and why avian flu outbreaks occur.

“You need ecological perspectives and [to] include climate change in this,” he said. Without that, you’re missing 80% of the avian influenza picture, he added.

Since wild birds can carry multiple pathogens without necessarily showing symptoms, Huettmann said that it’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint or forecast how strains of avian flu may mutate or become highly pathogenic.

“In terms of these mutations, nobody knows when they happen. It’s like a time bomb,” Huettmann said.

He explained that even seemingly unrelated things like stress from climate change or environmental contamination like heavy metals could alter how seriously avian flu impacts birds.

Even the term “avian flu” is an oversimplification for a disease that can infect many different species, he said. Researchers, for example, have found low pathogenic avian influenza in animals ranging from farmyard horses and pigs to seals and whales. In Alaska and Montana, even bears have recently tested positive for H5N1.

That jump into mammals is something researchers are paying close attention to. In early January, a European study found a slightly mutated strain of H5N1 on a mink farm in Spain, which researchers suspect came from interactions with wild birds. World virologists are concerned because the virus has acquired a novel mutation that allows it to readily spread from mammal to mammal. This mutation is a concerning change because it makes it more likely that human to human transmission could occur in the future.

With migratory birds winging their way to Alaska from all over the world this spring, State Veterinarian Bob Gerlach said it’s important for people to be cognizant of avian influenza. Hunters and wildlife enthusiasts can report strange bird behavior or dead birds to U.S. Fish and Wildlife. People with poultry should be conscious of keeping feed and water sources inside, and keeping up with notifications from the state.

Gerlach cautioned Alaskans, especially those with poultry, against letting their guard down.

“We know from looking at the wild bird populations that it’s not over. And it seems that there’s going to be a risk come spring,” he said.

Alaska’s game management board has authorized an elk hunt on Zarembo Island in Southeast Alaska for the first time in nearly two decades. The state Department of Fish and Game opposed the hunt, but strong support from Wrangell and other local communities helped convince the board to take the leap.

Elk are not native to the Alexander Archipelago in Southeast Alaska. They were introduced to Etolin Island in the mid-1980s and spread to other islands nearby. That includes Zarembo, which is about 10 miles across the Zimovia Strait and visible from downtown Wrangell.

But the Alaska Department of Fish & Game has shut down elk hunting on Zarembo for the past 17 years, concerned about low population.

Chris Guggenbickler is the chair of Wrangell’s Fish & Game Advisory Committee. He says locals have kept the flame for a Zarembo elk hunt.

“Elk is always something that we’re talking about,” he says. “There are so many people that have talked to us about the abundance of elk on Zarembo and the fact that they want to have a hunt again.”

Biologist Frank Robbins, who oversees Game Unit 3, the area around Petersburg and Wrangell, told Board of Game members at their January meeting in Ketchikan that he’s seen at most 23 elk on Zarembo Island. He says the current population is around 50, although that’s just an estimation because elk are hard to spot on the island.

“There is no available data that suggests that the Zarembo Island elk population has increased since hunting ended in 2006,” Robbins told the Board of Game.

For Board of Game members, that raised the question of whether it’s possible to sustainably harvest elk when the population is so small. Biologist Robbins was doubtful but conceded it’s feasible.

“I’ve been a biologist for pushing 30 years,” Robbins related, “I did at one time manage the Chitina bison herd, and year in and year out we would fly over the Chitina bison herd and count 50 animals. We issued two permits annually.”

Committee member Guggenbickler doesn’t think Fish & Game’s population estimate is correct .

“The last hunt was in 2006 — there were six bulls taken. They closed the hunt, thinking that there really weren’t a lot of bulls left on the island,” Guggenbickler says, “And then the proposal came off of the books. It’s been 17 years since we’ve had a hunt, so they’ve had that long to rebuild.”

There’s already a federal subsistence elk hunt in the area, but it excludes Zarembo and Etolin Islands and some of the smaller neighboring islets.

The Board of Game rejected three other elk hunt proposals, including a different proposed hunt on Zarembo and nearby islands, as well as two proposals to modify the current elk hunt on Etolin Island, south of Zarembo. But they unanimously supported Guggenbickler’s and Buness’s proposal at their January meeting.

Hunters from around the region wrote letters and spoke to the board about how they’ve seen increasing numbers of elk on Zarembo Island. And Guggenbickler says he believes the strong show of public support for the proposal helped swing the board’s favor.

Burnett said his opinion on the hunt was also somewhat swayed by the fact that elk aren’t a native species.

“Maybe elk just don’t belong there, and maybe it’s just not an appropriate place for elk,” Burnett said.

Robbins, the biologist, referenced a research project in the 90s which found significant overlap — about 64% — in the diets of elk and deer, especially when resources are strained after a heavy snow.

Guggenbickler says he explained to the board that deer are a major meat source in Wrangell, and hunting elk could reduce the deer’s competition for food.

“We were worried that if there was a hard winter, the deer were gonna end up on the beach, the elk would have ate all the food, the deer would have been compromised,” he said.

The newly approved elk hunt will take place in October. Hunters can apply for one of up to 25 tags to take one bull, but the actual number available will be up to Robbins, the area biologist.

Guggenbickler expects the department to be cautious in how they issue tags.

“The department is going to be conservative because they feel there’s going to be a higher success rate,” he said. “Etolin has a very low success rate; there are actually quite a few tags that go out but the success rates are only two or three percent.”

Guggenbiclker says he and colleagues on the Wrangell Advisory Committee may try to add a residency priority to the hunt.

“We were concerned that the entire proposal might fail based on that,” he said. “So the idea was just to kind of get the whole thing in the books – let’s baby-step this thing, and then hopefully we can get a resident priority later on.”

For now, they’re just glad it passed.

“Elk are kind of one of those species we don’t get a shot at much around here, and there’s some huge animals,” Guggenbickler says, “And I think everybody’s just hoping they might draw that tag and kill that great big bull.”

If the new Zarembo elk hunt makes it on the official regulation books in time, hunters may be able to submit their names for an elk tag on Zarembo this fall, with the first season in October of 2024.