A little bit of history on UAF campus

I had skied out to the outdoor rifle range on Rifle Range Road at UAF, as a group I'm with has been using it for some competitions. I'd asked one of them I was with what this blue building - decrepit, boarded and chained up, and littered with sheds and ATCOs.  It seemed like a strange building for the University to keep around.

After a while, I finally got around to asking some of the other people if they had any idea what it was, and one of the people who had been around Fairbanks a little longer said, "Oh, that's where they first heard Sputnik." Well, that's too interesting for me to just leave alone! I got what few details I could out of him at the time, and went home. After which, I did some digging around online. It turns out not only was Fairbanks the first place to hear Sputnik... but the first person to see it, to boot. And where and how did that person see them? Where else but on the outhouse:

As Davis reports in his book "Alaska Science Nuggets," Dexter Stegemeyer was the first Fairbanksan known to have seen Sputnik just clearing the western horizon, which was where it entered the view through his open outhouse doorway. Stegemeyer knew he'd seen something unusual, but only realized what it was after he heard a description of the satellite.)

That's from the GI's write up about hearing Sputnik, an Alaskan first. It's a great read, and barely tops a page. Definitely worth the read!

A sense of history

Aside from being known as, in the words of Grounds Keeper Willey, "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys," the French also have a considerable reputation for sloth. Not only do they insist on an extraordinary amount of time off for vacation (or extraordinary for Americans, who get practically none), not only do they tend to take long lunches, not only do they retire rather early, but their work week capped at 35 hours! Unheard of, in the United States, to be sure.

Without discussion of the economic benefits and costs of such behaviour, there might be a good historical explanation for the French national attitude towards work. Such ethic might be explained by the fact that up until the mid 19th century, the rural French spent much of their time hibernating. Oh, it isn't true hibernation - it doesn't even qualify as torpor - but the French seemed to spend much of their time napping away the winter. Consider this:

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They "hibernated" even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region's economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: "These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately."

When put like that, I have a hard time finding fault with the French work week. After all, they're just keeping a proud French tradition alive. There are some downsides to sleeping the winter away, however. Recent evidence points to increases in sleep being related to decreases in life expectancy. The magic number is 'less than eight hours,' it seems. Which is a shame, because I like to get 9 hours of rest. Clearly, I'll need to change that habit...

Interestingly, despite the fact that France seems to work so little, they command a respectable per-capita GDP. Obviously, it hasn't torpedoed their economy that badly. And that's a 35 hours work week before you take away all the non-work spend striking.

It's the new Cornell

I heard this on the radio, and it's too funny not to pass on: Glenn Beck is starting his own "University!"

Now I'm absolutely positive that his scholarly credentials are impeccable, and Universities will be falling over themselves to recruit Beck-U graduates for graduate school.

I find it curious that he thinks the Federalist Papers are a mandate for limited government. I thought the Federalist Papers were actually advocating the larger government, and it was the Anti-Federalists who were wary of the expansion of governmental power. But they largely lost that argument (though they got a few concessions in the mix known as the "Bill of Rights") and nobody likes the losing team, not the least TV pundits.

Is it just me, or does "Beck-U" Sound like a curse? "Beck-U buddy!" "Oh yeah, well "Beck-U in the face!" I think we can all agree that this kind of profanity needs kept away from children (won't somebody think of them?)

The Death of Fr. Juvenaly

A friend of mine send a link to me. I don't know why he did, but I'm very glad he did because it has a very good account of 1790s history in it. It's about the death of one of Alaska's earliest missionaries, Fr. Juvenaly. Fr. Juvenaly was a Russian orthodox, and moderately old for point in history - remember than amongst Whites in America, half of America was under the age of 16 in 1790. He was, therefore, a bit old to be "gallivanting around" as a missionary. None the less, he apparently came first to the Kenai, then to Kodiak, where he crossed to the Alaska Peninsula/Iliamna area, never to be seen or heard from again. What fate had he met? Was it the Iliamna monster?

[...] Then, about a hundred years later, an American historian, Hubert Bancroft, published an account of Father Juvenaly’s death purportedly based on the priest’s own words as he recorded them in a diary that a man named Ivan Petrov claimed to have found and translated. According to this diary, Father Juvenaly fell into temptation, having been seduced by the daughter of a local Indian chief, and then was hacked to death for refusing to marry her. That is all I knew about this incident until my Yup’ik father-in-law, Adam Andrew, who was born about 1914 in the mountains near the source of the Kwethluk River, decided to tell me the story about “the first priest to come into our region.”

The whole story is wonderful. You can continue reading here.

North From Anchorage

Here's a video from somewhere between 1925 and 1930 that I found online at the Alaskafilmarchives account at youtube.

I really like this account, and think it's a good idea - this opens it up to anyone, not just people in Fairbanks or Anchorage. My one regret is that the films are mostly of white towns and not much otherwise. Still, even though it's poorly representative, it's a good source. It's always interesting to see what it was like before we were alive to see it.

Führerstodestag

It's that time year of again!
65 years ago, a 56 yearold, hiding in his bunker with his enemies surrounding him, committed suicide by cyanide capsule and gunshot to the right temple. That's right, today is dead Hitler day. Never heard of dead Hitler day? What about Führerstodestag? No? Well, more's the shame. It's, naturally, the anniversary of that perticular toad's death. It went a little like this

By late April 1945, his little empire in the sand had got kicked down pretty thoroughly. The Russians were occupying parts of Berlin, where his bunker was located. On the 22nd, he apparently had a nervous breakdown as he realized it was over - that the Russians were battling their way to the centre of town, and he knew they would get him, take him, and they probably wouldn't kill him right away. on the 28th, he leant that one of his senior commanders was negotiating with the Allied forces to surrender, and that former allay Mussolini had been executed. On midnight of April 29th, he married his mistriss in an abrupt cerimony, dictated his will at 4am, took a nap, and at 3:30pm, shot himself in the temple, while his himstress only used the cyinide.

I like spelling out the details, because of how ignoble it was. It really gets the skinheads angry, especially if you lay it on thick. I reccomend the following, myself:

You know how big of a coward he was? He had to test the cyanie on his dog, because he was too scared.

Which is true - he killed his dog, and her offspring, basically in a fit of paranoia. After he died, his staff almost immediately all light up their cigarettes - Hitler was anti-smoking. He was that well liked.

Traditional Dead-Hitler days activites include picking fights with racist jerks, gloating over holocaust deniers, enjoying the feeling that bad people sometimes get what's coming to them on earth, and having a big hunk of meat for dinner - Hitler was a very ardent vegetarian, too. He reportedly liked going into graphic detail about slaugtering animals, when he had meat eating guests over. Strangely, slaughtering humans had no such ill-effects on his stomach...

So, happy vegetarian Führerstodestag, folks. Unless you're a skinhead, in which case I hope it's miserable.

Fighting the Civil War all over again.

It's shocking to think this is 2010. I heard a comedian say "This is the most futuristic date in the history of all dates!" which is about spot on. Honestly, we have iPod touches, you can fly from Fairbanks to Germany without dying of scurvy along the way, and we have people living full-time in space. I'm a huge fan of the future, because it brings advancements that my grandparents wouldn't have even dreamt possible. Even if we don't get personal flying cars, I'm looking forward what Detroit invents 20 or 30 years from now. Maybe it'll be a hover-car, like Star Wars. I can live with a Hover Car.

Yet despite how neat the future is, there seems to be a group of people who are dead set on disparaging it by pointing to it and saying times are bad, and wrong, and we need to go back in time. This is topic on here frequently, since I do not like this rosy retrospective. It washes history, making it clean, palatable. An acquaintance of mine made the claim that there wasn't murder in the village before white people showed up. This is an insane claim that even half-way listening to stories would disprove. And even if we had no more stories ever again, the archaeological signs of conflict and strife are there for us to find. There's also Texas writing Jefferson out of the history books because he disagrees with their politics, and a general fetishization of the "Founding Fathers" to almost god-like figures. Goldman-Animation made a great short video about the so-called "Golden Age."



I say this, because nationally, there seems to be a form of this going on in the south. People are ignoring parts of the civil war which don't support their modern ethics, and only thinking about the parts that do. There's a revisionist attitude about that leads people to say that the Civil War wasn't about Slavery. You see this in the recent proclamation of Confederate History Month, and other things of that sort. I've heard people on call in shows on the Radio talk about how the new Tea Party movement is like the Confederates of old, fighting against large government. I have to keep from groaning and holding my head, when I hear this - I've cut back my radioshow diet because of these crazy statements.

In this great article in The Atlantic, they lay, flat out, that the Civil War was about Slavery. Full stop. But the urge to feel irrational shame over that is no better in having irrational joy about having a King or Queen as a great-great-grand-whatever. It's irrational. To be mindful of history is a good thing. To try and wrap ourselves in it, claiming it as our own, as if we'd somehow done something to earn events that happened long before we were born is a little arrogant. And if someone living in the south really, really wants to do that anyhow? Well, there's plenty of heroic figures from the ex-CSA that could be lionized for being generally good, moral, upstanding people without washing history clean of slavery and race. I'd strongly recommend that essay. But I'd add to the end of it that we carry on in the spirit of our ancestors, but without being our predecessors. After all, when we make our own try at life, we'll have iPods.

Reinabou

I'm reading papers, as always. I don't know how I missed this one from Dave Klein, one of our great emeritus. We're lucky to still have him around the department, with his decades of knowledge. When he talks, it pays to listen.
Here's a neat picture from one of his 1980 papers:

Fig 5. A caribou-reindeer cross trained as a sled deer at the Reindeer Experiment Station, Fairbanks,  June 29, 1926. (L. J. Palmer Collection - Univ. of Alaska).

The Bad Squire

You know, I've had this song on my playlist for a few years now. It's called "The Bad Squire," and it's based on a poem by a clergyman named Charles Kingsley in the 1800s. Chumbawamba - you know, the band that wrote Tubthumping? - did an album called "English Rebel Songs (1381-1984)" where they sing a lot of these old songs with just the acoustic guitar. Anyhow, I actually gave it a deep listen, while I was writing changes to my research manuscript I've been working on for a year now. I knew the song was about how a land owner punished the poor for poaching game, when the the poor were trying to protect their crops so to ward off starvation. But I actually heard some lyrics for the first time, that really brought me to the here and now:

You have sold out the labouring man, Squire
Both body and soul for to shame
To pay for your seat in the House, Squire
And to pay for the feed of your game
You made him a poacher yourself, Squire
When you'd give not the work nor the meat
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving poor little one's feet

(Emphasis my own). That choked me up, when I made the connection between the lyrics with what people still go through today, in the vill. It's no longer a class selling people to wallow in poverty, but urban interests. But is the end result any different?

Here's the song in total:

Where we don't live

A lecture from Dr. Steven Davies, entitled "Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization"

This was just plain fascinating. Bascially, he argues that Civilizations are units of a) common experience and b) common symbolic (especially symbolics in communication). And that if you take the worldview, and experience of someone in Boston, MA today, and compare it to someone living in Boston, MA 300 years ago, it's fundamentally different. That Americans, Britons, Canadians, Germans etc can suggest that they're the direct cultural descendants of the Greeks and Romans is somewhere between absurd and just plain silly.  Here's the blurb:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of 'Western Civilization' - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

Alaska: Then and Now

Click to enbiggen.
While intellectually I know that Alaska's changed a lot since 1949, it's sometimes hard to realize just how much. I've been looking at old topographical maps, which show Alaska as it was 50-70 years ago, looking at village locations to see what went away, what the surveyors missed, and what popped up since then.  In the YK, the BIA had more effect on where villages ended up than almost anything else - I suspect that might be true on the North Slope, too, but I don't know for sure.

When Goldstream didn't have a road, or anything, I couldn't help but notice this little CDP called "Happy." It's just to the east of Ester Dome. Right now, it's where Sheep Creek Rd. crosses the Goldstream Creek. What happened to Happy? Did they become sad and leave? Right now, there's a small collection of homes there, on the less cheerfully named "Aurora Borealis Drive." Bring back Happy, I say!

There's something else I've noticed, but it isn't on this map I've shown you. When I drove the Parks Highway back in July, I realized that there was an air strip right after you leave the Denali area, when you start getting into the very edge of the Susitna valley, in the Chulitna headwaters. It's called "Summit." It's a very lovely area, and there's a large lake (Edes Lake), and a couple random cabins over there. Oh, and wind turbine. I started wondering what was the story behind Summit - I tried googling it, but I can't find anything.

When I looked at the area in a 1951 topo, even ignoring the highway, Summit looks very different. It had roads going up and down a bit - rare in that area, for that time. And there are a lot of black dots that indicate cabins... more than Cantwell. Even back then it had an Air Strip. What was Summit? I don't see any signs of mining either in person, or on the map. It's a very pretty area, but it's a very inhospitable area. I really want to know what the story behind Summit was.

Edited to add: Looking at these old topos, and just thinking about challenges 110 years ago in general,  I can't help but feel like all of us alive now are frauds. We're not our grandfathers and grandmothers. We have it so easy it's laughable.
On the other hand, I'll trade being a fraud for having a mean life expectancy of twice of 1900s. That's 2x the time to feel like a fraud.

Great and Telling Tales

I wish I found these sooner. They're a series of animated history shorts that seeks to tell a basic bit of something or another. There's the story of Garfield's Assassination, when Carter was attacked by a killer Swamp Rabbit, and how dinosaurs were slow to get public acceptance. Here's two that I like:






Go to YouTube and see the rest! They're great!

Domestication of Foxes

Since the last two posts have been fox pictures, why not some fox-related science? Also, I found someone else's write up, and it reminded me about just how cool an experiment was...

For a long time, people observed that domesticated animals seemed to possess a constellation of traits - depigmentation, floppy ears, dwarf form, and retention of juvenile characteristics - in at least some breeds, if not all the breeds. Darwin himself made particular note of it when he wrote "The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication," one of his lesser known volumes. I just recently read that he noted the bit about floppy ears in "On the Origin of Species," but I must have missed that - which is easy to do, given how much he wrote!

Now in the late 1940s to late 1950s, there was a Russian named Dmitri Belyaev, who had the notion that perhaps we'd been thinking about domestication all wrong. Up until that point, many people had been thinking about it in terms of large macroscale traits that are easily measurable - size of the pup, whether it has blue eyes, or a sickle tail. The thinking went over time we selected for the traits which made dogs, which resulted in the beasts we have today. This is no doubt true, but Dmitri's insight was to think at a higher level - what if domestication happened by first selecting for broad behavioural traits - things like "Tamenes" and "lack of fear of humans." The field of behavioural ecology hadn't yet been codified, and the link between behaviour was poorly appreciated then. It can't be understated what an intuitive leap this was.

Dmitri also had the serious disadvantage of being a geneticist in the soviet era of Lysenkoism: Lysenkoism was the (erroneous) belief that acquired traits could be heritable between generations. If that smells like Lamark, you're not far off. Trofim Lysenko had the great advantage of being a ardent communist and supporter of Leninism. He was put in a position of power and influence in Soviet Russia, and Lysenkoism became the official scientific dogma of Russia for quite some time. This wouldn't have been that big of a set back except for two things. First, he was an agricultural scientist, and Trofim oversaw quite a few instances of massive crop failure. His responses were frequently pointless, and more aimed at grandstanding than anything rooted in science. Starvation was an issue. Secondly, over time the geneticists became more and more alienated. They were denounced as Bourgeois elitists (gosh, that sounds familiar...) and with Stalin's blessing, the Russians began executing several, arresting others, and merely firing still others. Dmitri was lucky not to be shot for his ideas.

The experiment was fairly straight forward: Take a large number of foxes (~150), and select the 5% most tame males, and 30% most tame females for breeding. This was repeated generation after generation, selecting for tameness by ejecting animals that showed aggression towards humans from the experiment, and ranking the remaining animals on how afraid they were of humans.

The experiment proceeded very quickly. Within a very small number of generations, animals began behaving amenably toward humans. While inbreeding was a serious concern, they calculated that inbreeding was actually rather low (2% to 7%), and without knowing a lot about fox dispersal, I would be inclined to say that's lower than wild levels. Over time, the genetic traits that lend themselves to making an animal sociable were enriched. 40 Years after the project started, most of the animals were in the "social elite" - that is to say, they actively sought out human interaction. They would wag, they would bark, they would lick human faces. Behaviourally, they never left the puppy-period of being socializable.

Curiously, after a number of generations (I believe 5, but I don't have a primary source on hand), they began to see some traits that where rarely seen in the wild become quite common among their experimental animals. The sickle tail, where the tail is turned up, drooping ears, a depigmented "star" on their forehead which appeared white, and uneven colouration. You can click on the picture to the right to enbiggen it and see the traits. That animal in the bottom right corner isn't a Border Collie - it's a fox.

The explanation for the arrival of these traits is pretty clever. I'm going to compare it to working on your boat. Let's say you want to make your boat go faster. The first thing you can do is to pluck some low hanging fruit - clean off the hull, for example. But after you do the basic, easily done things, all you have left are major alterations to either the form of the hull - maybe reshaping it - or tinkering with your outboard. When you start doing that, you start changing other characters of your boat, too. Sure, you might have souped up your honda to go real fast, but now you'll get terrible gas mileage.

Selecting for complex traits like "tameness" is a lot like messing with your boat. After you've done all the easy things, and made them as tame as you can without actually changing much, all there is left is messing with components that will effect a lot of other things. Yes, Adrenaline plays a serious role in aggression and fear, but it has precurses that play roles in hair pigment. So by fiddling with the production of adrenaline, you're also causing these changes in pigmentation.

Sadly, Dmitri didn't live long enough to see his experiment really become the blockbuster it became. He died in 1985, after seeing signs that his ideas were spot on. His views of genetics (obviously) were vindicated, and the Soviet Union began backing off Lysenkoism in the 60s. Their biological sciences program never really recovered from the expulsion and murder of people who studied evolution by natural selection. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the group still running his experiment became hard for money, and culled quite a few animals. The remainder they subsidize by selling fully domesticated Silver Foxes as pets to the rich. I can only imagine what an animal as smart as a fox would do turned loose in someone's home - if cats can learn to turn doorknobs, imagine what a fox could do!



Photocredits: First three from Wikimedia. First two figures from Belyaev 1978. Final figure from Trut 1999. Idea from the post came when I stumbled on this while looking for DIY airconditioner blueprints.

Führerstodestag

64 years ago, a 56 yearold, hiding in his bunker with his enemies surrounding him, committed suicide by cyanide capsule and gunshot to the right temple. That's right, today is dead Hitler day. Never heard of dead Hitler day? What about Führerstodestag? No? Well, more's the shame. It's, naturally, the anniversary of that perticular toad's death. It went a little like this

By late April 1945, his little empire in the sand had got kicked down pretty thoroughly. The Russians were occupying parts of Berlin, where his bunker was located. On the 22nd, he apparently had a nervous breakdown as he realized it was over - that the Russians were battling their way to the centre of town, and he knew they would get him, take him, and they probably wouldn't kill him right away. on the 28th, he leant that one of his senior commanders was negotiating with the Allied forces to surrender, and that former allay Mussolini had been executed. On midnight of April 29th, he married his mistriss in an abrupt cerimony, dictated his will at 4am, took a nap, and at 3:30pm, shot himself in the temple, while his himstress only used the cyinide.

I like spelling out the details, because of how ignoble it was. It really gets the skinheads angry, especially if you lay it on thick. I reccomend the following, myself:

You know how big of a coward he was? He had to test the cyanie on his dog, because he was too scared.

Which is true - he killed his dog, and her offspring, basically in a fit of paranoia. After he died, his staff almost immediately all light up their cigarettes - Hitler was anti-smoking. He was that well liked.

Traditional Dead-Hitler days activites include picking fights with racist jerks, gloating over holocaust deniers, enjoying the feeling that bad people sometimes get what's coming to them on earth, and having a big hunk of meat for dinner - Hitler was a very ardent vegetarian, too. He reportedly liked going into graphic detail about slaugtering animals, when he had meat eating guests over. Strangely, slaughtering humans had no such ill-effects on his stomach...

So, happy vegetarian Führerstodestag, folks. Unless you're a skinhead, in which case I hope it's miserable.

The history of Reindeer in Alaska

I've been reading a lot about the history of Reindeer herding lately, and my head is so full of thoughts that I can scarcely get them down on paper fast enough. Two very important things I've been reading have been "Eskimos, Reindeer, and Land," a publication by UAF's school of Ag and Land Resource Management from the 80s. More recently, but more tangentially, Gary Kofinas (UAF) and Don Russell (Environment Canada) wrote a chapter in "Family-Based Reindeer Economy, and the Status and Management of Caribou Populations" on the status of North American caribou in the high arctic, and their use as a subsistence resource. There was 4 pages on modern Reindeer herding on the Seward Peninsula, which might not seem that much, but it's helped me clear up some long standing questions I'd had.

If you're not clear on the difference between reindeer and caribou, I'd describe it like this: Caribou are to reindeer as wolves are to dogs. They're both members of the same species (Rangifer tarandus) but they're different subspecies (Reindeer: R. tarandus tarandus; Alaskan Caribou: R. tarandus granti). Reindeer are semidomestic - they've had a long history of being herded in northern Eurasia, but there are also wild populations of reindeer, and the two groups freely interbreed. Physically, reindeer are shorter than caribou, with thicker chests, more muscle mass, and they're more likely to have spots or stripes on their coat. Behaviourally, caribou and reindeer differ in that caribou are less docile, and tend to be migratory. The top picture is of a caribou, and the second picture is of reindeer at the Ag. station.

The overwhelming majority of reindeer in the state are the descendants of reindeer imported from Russia in the late 1800s, when the Reverend Sheldon Jackson imported 1,280 reindeer to provide to the eskimo in the areas he was evangelizing. The hope was that with the introduction of reindeer, subsistence hunters would stop hunting, and take up pastoral activities - somewhere in all of this, they were looking for people to join their brand of Christianity. I imagine it worked like opening a bank account, and the bank mailing you a free toaster. "Accept Jesus today and get two free reindeer! (Offer not for existing parishioners)."

Oh, randomly. A lot of the old bible translations use qusngiq for sheep, which amuses me to no end. `Reindeer of god, who takes away the sins of the world.` Okay, I'm easily amused.

All glibness (is that a word?) aside, Jackson was only partially concerned with evangelization, and no doubt part of his importation of reindeer stemmed from a crises that he thought was growing, in the form of declining Caribou numbers. Long ago, it would mean people would merely shift their focus to new food sources, like more whaling or fishing, and de-emphasize caribou as a food source. Similarly, Jackson interpreted the old sod houses and qasgiqs as being miserable, damp places, having overlooked that they were quite nice in the winter, and weren't really occupied past the spring.

Whatever the humanitarian motivations were, reindeer herding was quickly associated with religious missions, and was spread to various areas by various churches - Bethel by the Moravians in 1901, Point Barrow by the Presbyterians in 1898, Kotzebue by the California Yearly Meeting-Friends in 1901, etc. The Barrow situation is of interest, because the reindeer were drove to partially provide relief for stranded white whalers; it's my understanding of the story that the reindeer drive ended up being more of crisis than the stranded whalers. One of my graduate students has the whole story of that, but she's currently out on a well earned vacation. There were other disastrous reindeer drives, such as a drive of animals to Circle, where only about 1/3rd of the animals survived. I can't find a single time in the history books that a reindeer drive worked.

After 1930, reindeer herding underwent a rapid and catastrophic collapse, with populations going from 640,000 to around 25,000 between 1935 and 1950. The numbers remained stable there for a period, before entering a steady decline. The reasons for the collapse are mutlifaceted. Part of it was over-grazing in some areas. Other reasons were failures to retain reindeer when caribou herds would enter the area. Part of it is was related to a en-mass change of ownership mandated by the Reindeer act of 1937. The Reindeer Act of '37 warrants its own post, really. Boy, do I have a lot to say about that!

Now days, reindeer herding is essentially only conducted on the Seward Peninsula, with minor herds on Nunavak, Umnak, St. Paul, St. George, and very recent, small herds in Palmer, Delta Junction and on the Kenai Peninsula. For the herds off the road system, the biggest issues are concentration of knowledge, logistics, and the near-total collapse of the Asian antler market, which used to be a major source of income. The data I see for the value of reindeer meat up to 2000 shows a steady decline from '95 on, suggesting that alternatives to the meat are becoming more desired, or possibly the price of reindeer meat is overvalued, and any increases in price result increased no-sale. I'm not an economist, though. The Reindeer project had more to say about the state's future economic viability.

The reindeer industry in Alaska, and especially the industry at Seward Peninsula, is facing major problems.

The growing caribou herd represents a major threat to the reindeer industry in Alaska. The caribou has a devastating impact on the pasture areas; they attract preditors when they migrate into the pasture areas; and the caribou bring the domesticated reindeer along when they migrate through the permit areas.

There is a huge potential in the market for reindeer meat and other products both within Alaska and in the lower 48. To be able to develop this market the industry depends on access to abattoirs and other essential infrastructure. But the main disadvantage for the development of the industry is the high transport costs. Concerning the size of the potential market for reindeer products, the profitability of the industry could be increased if the above mentioned problems are solved.

Our reindeer and caribou research is focusing on the north slope, especially the Central Arctic Herd, the Western Arctic Herd, the Teshekpuk Lake herd, and to a lesser extent the Porcupine Herd. My own interest is more in the Mulchatna Herd, on the lower Kuskokwim, where the now-defunt Killbuck caribou herd used to reside - as previously mentioned, Bethel was a site of introduction for reindeer by the Moravians.

Muskox in Alaska

I want to write a little bit about muskoxen in Alaska. Most of this comes from my infinitely fallible memory, and a paper called `Status of Muskoxen in Alaska` by T.E. Smith in 1984. We're getting ready to do some work on Muskox in the Seward Peninsula, so this is a great way to collect my thoughts on the subject.

Muskox are a large terrestrial grazing ungulate that are a) smaller than most people imagine and b) larger than most muskox handlers would like. It's interesting to note that muskox are actually closest related to a group of species called `Serows;` evolutionarily, muskox are a sort of goat-antelope. Don't see it? It's weird, but apparently true!

They're sort of like the blue-bloods of ungulates, having about as much diversity as a 1920s golf course (and the intelligence of one to boot) - for example, at the MHC DRB locus, a region of DNA responsible for disease resistance, the species has one allele. Even moose have 11, and Cattle? 68, which is more the norm in the rest of vertabrates. There's a dumb science joke that if you've tested one muskox, you've tested every muskox.

Muskox are endemic to alaska, but have had a checkered history, in the 1800s, due to a myriad of reasons, hunting being one of them. They are thought to have been totally expatriated (locally extinct) from Alaska by the late 1800s. In 1930s, spurred by concerns of global muskox numbers, the US feds funded the capture of 34 east greenland muskox, and they were transported to Fairbanks for a 5 year quarintine. In 1935, they relocated four animals (two m two f) to Nunivak Island, choosing the island on the basis that it was an enclosed space with apparently rich forage and no native predators. In 1936, they transplanted the remaining surviving animals, and some offspring that had been subsequently born, totaling 16 males 11 females.

After 32 years, mannagers selected Nelson Island as the next reintroduct for Alaska. Though Nelson Island isn't far from Nunivak, they're seperated by a patch of ocean, and Nelson Island varies considerably in its topography and browse - how, exactly, I'm not sure, but I'm told the veg is different, and I trust the folks who told me. The first introduction was 8 in 1967 (5m 3f), followed by six males and 9 females in 1968. Nelson Island is really just an island in name, and there isn't as much barrier to dispersal (beyond habitat) for the Mox.

Future introductions were ANWR (1969-1970; 65 animals), Cape Thompson (1970 and 1977; 70 animals) and Seward Peninsula (1970 and 1981; 72 animals). There's been a number of other events, where they took animals into captivity for either the LARS herd, the Unalakleet herd, or zoo animals, but those really don't factor into my world (well, except the LARS animals). Currently, I don't know if there's been any moving animals around since 84.

You can see my lovely pen-addations to the Mox-map off to the left. I-are-an-arteest, yes, but that should give you the idea what happened. Nunivak came from a small founder population, and all other populations in the state are serial dilutions of the Nunivak Island population. This is of special note, because of the effects it would have on the over-all diversity of the animals. As I mentioned before, diversity was extremely low to begin with, but every time you go throug a `bottleneck` (a period where a few animals are responsible for all the resulting offspring) you experiance a large loss in diversity. This, by the by, is why humans are roughly 28th cousins with every other human. We love talking about how different we are, but thanks to a pre-history bottleneck, we've got scant diversity to talk about. If dolphins were studying us, I bet they'd treat us like a bunch of inbred yokels. :)

If you'll forgive a bit of math, in a randomly breeding population with non-overlapping generations (two huge assumptions!), the probability of losing any given allele (or form of a gene) is

(1-p)^2N

Where p=the frequency of the allele before the bottleneck and N is the size of the bottleneck. Let's pretend we had an allele that made up 10% of all the copies of the gene. That gives us

(1-.1)^(2*31)=0.001455

in the case of the Nunivak introduction, or .145% chance of it being lost. That assumes all 31 animals who were introduced into Nunivak had reproductive success. For the cows, that seems fairly probable, but given males engage in Harem defence, it seems improbable that all 18 males had success. Assuming only a third of the males had any success in their lifetime, we get,

(1-.1)^(2*19)=0.01824

Or about 2%. This may not seem like much, but taken across the whole genome, these effects are steadily accumulative.

However! While some is lost, as they say,`all is not lost.` If you run the numbers, a founder size of 10 is still enough to preserve 95% of the heterozygosity (the number of individuals with two different copies of the same gene). Using Van Coeverden De Groot and Boag's 2004 estimate of heterozygosity for perfect alleles, 95% of 0.504, while low, is dangerously low. However, if you use the previous H estimate of 0.018, 95% of that is a very small number.

Where does that leave us? Alaskan muskox are a currently mixed story. While some populations have shown success, others appear to be floundering markedly. As the state would like to see the muskox fully restored to its entire endemic range (as would many sport and subsistence hunters), we need to sort out what's going on demographically, and tease apart the factors involved in the success of some populations, and the detriment of others. We need to know how much nutrition is a factor in the troubles some are facing, and how much the high degree of relatedness has impacted this nascent population.

Mox picture brazenly stolen from LARS.

"Thomas Jefferson wants "murder robbery" taught in our elementary schools, people!"

Think this election is long, and especially nasty? Us crazy modern kids have nothing on the skills of the masters. Guys like Jefferson and Adams - people we think of as the founding fathers of the country, also sired a bastard child we call `dragging the a campaign through a cesspool.` I got to say, compared to those, the current Presidential election looks pretty tame - at one point, John Quincy Adams said that if Jackson was elected, we would all be hanged by the neck. Yes, apparently his opponent was characterizing his position as being `pro-murder-of-everyone-everywhere.`

A lot of the politics is just plan funny, 200 years after the fact. I wonder what sort of laughs we'll be providing to our great grandkids?