Of Conferences and Surprising Carnivores

Just as winter approaches, my morale gets a needed boost. The annual Arctic Science Conference is for science junkies as a really big sale at Nordstrom's is for shopping junkies. The goodies available are enough to trigger a feeding frenzy.

So this confirmed science junkie is very happy to be bound for Valdez soon, where the 48th conference is gathering. I can't begin to guess what remarkable things will be offered there, but I hope one of them will be the sequel to a story that began for me five years ago, the last time the northernmost branch of the American Association for the Advancement of Science convened in Valdez. It's filed in my old notebooks under the informal heading, "Bloodthirsty Bunnies from Back of Beyond."

That sounds like the title of a bad movie, but it was only my private joke about some promising research. In 1991, eight young Canadians set out to study the plants and animals living on the nunataks of the St. Elias Mountains, the high glaciated country above Kluane Lake where Alaska and the Yukon Territory meet.

"Glaciated" is an important word here, for nunataks stand like rocky islands in a sea of ice. They are the exposed peaks of mountains otherwise submerged under glaciers. They're much photographed but little studied, because their dramatic isolation makes them hard to get to. The young man who gave the conference presentation began with slides showing stark black fingers of rock pointing skyward from vast slopes of apparently featureless snow; yup, photogenic and dramatically isolated.

To overcome that isolation, the team had to hike for miles uphill into the wilderness from the base station at Kluane Lake---and they had to do it without their original leader. In fact, the first research team was only comprised of students, because the organizing faculty member encountered one of those life problems---my notes did not record whether it was a broken leg, a divorce, or what---that made it impossible for him to go. The students took a vote, named a graduate student as their new leader, and followed through with their expedition. (Kids: do not try this at home. Canada has a different relationship with its lawyers than the U.S. does, and such a venture here could lead to mighty lawsuits. In Canada, it led to a successful field season on the nunataks.)

The project had wide-ranging aims, from using the nunataks as a natural laboratory for studying climate change to ascertaining the pace of evolution and speciation in isolated habitats. But the students knew those were long-term goals, perhaps career-long problems for young scientists to contemplate. They were starting at the beginning, with observation and documentation. What species lived on the nunataks? How did they make their living there?

Among the 300-plus kinds of plants and animals the researchers identified were pikas, in this instance the bloodthirsty bunnies of my notebook. Pikas are sociable mammals, charming little rock-dwelling creatures that do look and even sound a bit like toy bunnies. Their cuddly appearance and usual diet of vegetation, which they harvest and dry into hay, make them frequent features in children's books on natural history of the high country.

In such books, they aren't cast as the villains. But on the nunataks, the struggling pika communities had taken a sinister turn. The food-short animals would prowl the surrounding snowfields, looking for the bodies of birds that had become exhausted while trying to fly over the energy-sapping refrigeration of the icefields. The scavenging pikas would tote their freeze-dried booty back to their burrows. If it wasn't yet dead---well, they had sharp teeth. They had adapted to the hard life of the nunataks, finding food where pikas had not looked before---in meat.

Who knows what other fascinating discoveries those intrepid Canadians have found in the years since? I hope to hear some of it this weekend---unless the researchers were eaten by sabertooth pikas.