University of Alaska Museum of the North

PUTTING UP AN EXHIBIT - All hands are on deck in the final days before our special exhibit opens. Denali Legacy: 100 Years on the Mountain tells the story of the first ascent of Denali through the climbers’ journal entries. It opens on Saturday, May 18.

AMPHIBIANS IN ALASKA?

The Stikine River in Southeast Alaska is home to all six of the known native species of amphibians, making it a herpetological hotspot compared to the other regions of the state. But has been more than 20 years since the last comprehensive study of amphibians in the area.

UAF Graduate Student Joshua Ream hopes to update the record with an inventory of amphibian populations in the Stikine River watershed this summer. He’s started a crowdfunding campaign to help him reach his goal.

“I hope to raise $1,000 by May 31 to cover the costs of field work,” he said. “The work will be conducted regardless of the success of the crowdfunding. But a successful campaign will greatly enhance the scope of this and other project components.”

Ream says amphibians act as the proverbial canary in the coalmine, giving advance warning of changes in aquatic ecosystems. “Changes in mean annual temperatures, numbers of frostless days, and levels of human activity are likely to cause changes in the distribution of amphibian species,” he says. “Colonization of new amphibian species, the threat of invasive species, several of which have established populations in southeast Alaska, and the spread of amphibian diseases will also present new problems for natural resource managers.”

The work also benefits the UA Museum of the North, as Ream’s passion for herpetological research has already produced great additions to the museum’s collections, according to Aquatics Curator Andres Lopez.

“Thanks to his ongoing field research in the Stikine and his leadership role in the Alaska Herpetological Society, the museum collections are becoming increasingly valuable resources for the study and management of Alaska’s amphibians.”

More information about Josh’s crowdfunding campaign here.

SIZING ALASKA’S MASKED SHREWS - Lathrop High School Senior Kelly May is headed to the National Junior Science & Humanities Symposium in Ohio this month with a research project refuting an earlier study on the effects of climate change on Alaska’s shrews. For this year’s Alaska Statewide High School Science Symposium (ASHSSS), May repeated a study published in 2005 using masked shrew specimens housed at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

The original study, which concluded that shrews in Alaska are getting larger, was based entirely on data downloaded from the museum’s online database. The authors were not able to inspect each specimen. May believed that not accounting for age in the original research may have biased the results, so he tracked down each of the 650 specimens used in the original study.

Each shrew species has a unique tooth pattern. Since Alaska’s shrews can be difficult to identify, May first confirmed the specimens were the correct species (Sorex cinereus). Determining the age involved looking at the degree of wear on their teeth. Shrews do not hibernate and are active year round but they rarely live more than 15 months. Adults that survive a winter show significant tooth wear, while shrews born in the spring do not.

May learned that young shrews are significantly smaller than overwintered adults and that overwintered females are bigger than overwintered males. In contrast to previously published claims, this means that age and sex both need to be accounted for in studies of body size in shrews, according to the museum’s curator of mammals, Link Olson.

By analyzing juvenile and adult specimens separately and accounting for sex, May found that individual shrews are actually getting smaller but that more are surviving the winter, meaning that the proportion of (larger-bodied) adults in a given population is increasing. So although the two studies reached seemingly similar conclusions, May’s results shed new light on the underlying mechanism:  shrews aren’t growing to a larger body size, they’re just surviving winters better.

In June, May will travel to Philadelphia to present his research at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists. May plans to attend UAF in the fall.

VIVA LA WINTER? Fairbanks could get four inches of snow today, followed by an arctic cold front. Here in the Interior of Alaska, we’re prepared to go from winter directly into summer. We’ll just skip the spring.

Here’s a link to the local newspaper’s story about the snow.