Post-Soviet era

According to some US individuals, including the group State Department Watch, eight Arctic islands currently controlled by Russia, including Wrangel Island, are claimed by the United States. However, according to the United States Department of State no such claim exists. The USSR/USA Maritime Boundary Treaty, which has yet to be approved by the Russian Duma, does not address the status of these islands.

In 2004 Wrangel Island and neighboring Herald Island, along with their surrounding waters, were added to UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Woolly mammoths, those icons of the ice age that most paleontologists assume died out around 9,500 years ago, survived in miniature form - or what passed for miniature among mammoths - until about 4,000 years ago on an Arctic Ocean island, according to new findings.  Mammoth teeth found in 1991 on Wrangel Island, located 120 miles off the coast of northeast Siberia, range from approximately 7,000 to 4,000 years old, report Andrei V. Sher and Vadim E. Garutt, paleontologists at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The relatively small teeth suggest that Wrangel "dwarf mammoths" reached at most 70 percent of the size of their Siberian kin, the researchers say.

"[This is] one of the most extraordinary fossil finds of recent times," writes Adrian M. Lister, a biologist at University College in London, England, in a comment accompanying the new report in the March 25 NATURE.  He estimates that the Wrangel animals stood 6 feet high and weighed 2 tons, compared with 10 1/2 feet and 6 tons for typical European mammoths.  The Wrangel finds may reignite debate over the reasons for the widespread mass extinctions of large mammals between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, Lister notes. Some researchers contend that the waning ice age produced abrupt environmental changes that doomed many creatures. Others argue that human hunters, at least in North America, rapidly killed off many large-bodied species (SN: 10/31/87, p.284).  "This is a wonderful discovery, however we end up interpreting its significance regarding mass extinctions," remarks Paul S. Martin, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who favors the latter theory,  Sher and Garutt studied 29 adult mammoth cheek teeth found by Sergei L. Vartanyan, a paleontologist at Wrangel Island State Reserve. Five of them are comparable in size to mammoth teeth previously found in Siberia, the researchers contend. Radiocarbon dating places these five specimens at about 20,000 to 13,000 years old.  The remaining 24 teeth are considerably smaller and date from around 7,000 to 4,000 years ago. This confirms similar radiocarbon ages derived last year from more than two dozen mammoth tusk and bone fragments discovered on Wrangel Island, Sher and Garutt assert.  Radiocarbon dating of bone "can be tricky," Martin points out. But fewer soil contaminants seep into bone buried in cold regions, he says. And two independent laboratories produced nearly the same ages for tusk and bone samples, the Russian scientists note.  Siberian mammoths probably reached Wrangel Island during the ice age, when low sea levels created a land bridge to the mainland, Sher and Garutt theorize. By 12,000 years ago, that connection had been submerged.  Unlike nearby islands, Wrangel currently contains vegetation similar to that of ice age grasslands and may have provided a hospitable environment for mammoth survival, the scientists hold. Full-bodied mammoths then evolved into smaller forms on Wrangel, they suggest. Dwarf forms of other large animals existed on late-ice-age islands elsewhere, Sher and Garutt note.  Why the Wrangel mammoths shrank remains unclear, Sher says. Some Siberian mammoths showed body-size decreases by 12,000 years ago, a process that may have accelerated on Wrangel because of the genetic isolation of a small population under nutritional pressures, he suggests.  Scientific reconstruction of plant and animal histories on the island is now under way, Sher points out, as well as an anatomical analysis of large and small Wrangel mammoth teeth.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Science Service, Inc.

Polar Bears: Population on Wrangel Island

The wind howls over Wrangel Island Zapovednik for much of the year. The winters are long and dark and the sun does not appear from November 22 to January 22. Snow blankets the landscape for 240 days of the year. Yet in the spring, tens of thousands of birds arrive to nest on the jagged cliffs, walruses gather on narrow spits to give birth, and female polar bears emerge from their dens with newborn cubs. In the summer, the tundra bursts into life, flowers color the landscape, and rivers run wild in the lush valleys. Wrangel Island and nearby Herald Island are the only land habitats for wildlife in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of the Bering Strait. Russian scientists called for creation of a nature reserve on the islands to protect the delicate Arctic ecosystem from growing human pressures.

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus), Pacific walruses (Odeobenus rosmarus), and snow geese (Anser caerulescens) attracted hunters and settlers to Wrangel in the first half of the 20th century. The decline of these animal populations was one of the reasons for creation of the Wrangel Island Zapovednik. Snow geese originally nested on the Russian mainland from Taimyr to Chukotka, but the large colonies on Wrangel are the last remaining populations in Asia today.

Despite its fierce reputation, the polar bear is a curious and calm creature. The polar bear is protected throughout the Arctic and is listed in the Russian and IUCN Red Books of endangered species. Wrangel and Herald Islands have the largest number of polar bear dens in the Russian Arctic. From 350-500 pregnant bears den on the two islands, or 80% of the breeding population in the Chukotka region. Some areas support 6-12 bears per square kilometer. The majority of the bear population remains at sea throughout the year searching for prey on the ice, returning to land only when the ice floes have melted completely.

The majority of the Pacific Walrus population summers north of the Bering Strait in theChukchi Sea along the north shore of eastern Siberia, around Wrangel Island, in the Beaufort Sea along the north shore of Alaska, and in the waters between those locations. Smaller numbers of males summer in the Gulf of Anadyr on the south shore of Siberia's Chukchi Peninsula and in Bristol Bay off the south shore of southern Alaska west of the Alaska Peninsula. In the spring and fall they congregate throughout the Bering Strait, reaching from the west shores of Alaska to the Gulf of Anadyr. They winter in the Bering Sea along the eastern shore of Siberia south to the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and along Alaska's southern shore.^[3] A 28,000 year old fossil walrus specimen was dredged out of San Francisco Bay, indicating that the Pacific Walrus ranged far south during the last ice age.^[24]

The much smaller Atlantic population ranges from the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, Svalbardand the western portion of the Russian Arctic. There are eight presumed sub-populations based largely on geographical distribution and movement data, five to the west of Greenland and three to the east.^[25] The Atlantic Walrus once ranged south to Cape Cod and occurred in large numbers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In April 2006, the Canadian Species at Risk Act listed the Northwest Atlantic Walrus population (Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador) as being extirpated in Canada.^[26]

The isolated Laptev population is confined year-round to the central and western regions of the Laptev Sea, the easternmost regions of theKara Sea, and the westernmost regions of the East Siberian Sea. Current populations are estimated to be between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals.^[27]

Their limited diving ability brings them to depend on shallow waters (and appropriate nearby ice coverage) to enable them to reach their preferred benthic prey.

Misconceptions about lemmings go back many centuries. In the 1530s, the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather (also featured in the folklore of the Inupiat/Yupik at Norton Sound), and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.⁵ This myth was refuted by the natural historian Ole Worm, who accepted that the lemmings could fall out of the sky but that they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation. It was Worm who first published dissections of a lemming, which showed that they are anatomically similar to most other rodents, and the work of Carl Linnaeus proved that the animals had a natural origin.⁶⁷

When large numbers of lemmings get on the move, some of them will inevitably drown while crossing rivers and lakes, like this one in Norway.

Lemmings became the subject of a popular myth that they commit mass suicide when they migrate. Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many may drown if the body of water is so wide as to stretch their physical capability to the limit. This fact combined with the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings gave rise to the myth. ⁸

The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.⁹¹⁰ Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.¹¹ A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used forWhite Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.¹²

In more recent times, the myth is well-known as the basis for the failed Apple Computer 1985 Super Bowl commercial "Lemmings" and the popular 1991 video game Lemmings, in which the player must stop the lemmings from mindlessly marching over cliffs or into traps. In a 2010 board game by GMT games, "Leaping Lemmings," players must maneuver lemmings across a board while avoiding hazards and successfully launch them off a cliff.

In the arcade mode of the Playstation 2 game Timesplitters: Future Perfect, players can earn the 'Lemming Award' for committing several suicides.

Because of their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. This metaphor is seen many times in popular culture, such as in the video game Lemmings, and in episodes of Red Dwarf and Adult Swim's show Robot Chicken.The Blink 182 song "Lemmings" also uses this metaphor, and the online game Urban Terror, falling to one's death is called doing the lemming thing.

Lesser Snow Geese generally mate for life, and raise an average of three or four young each year. The young migrate with their parents. During the summer, adult geese and the new young birds are all flightless. Scientists from Canada, the United States and Russia all work together to capture some of these birds during this flightless period to mark them so that their migratory paths can be better understood.

These birds fly 4,000 km between Wrangel Island and the Sanctuary. Their migration stops between nesting and wintering grounds include the Russian mainland, St.Lawrence Island (Bering Sea), the Yukon-Kuskokwin delta (western Alaska), Cooke Inlet (southern Alaska), and the mouth of the Stikine River in northern BC. Some marked individuals have made non-stop flights between Alaska and the Sanctuary (2500 km) in less than 36 hours.

Our Snow Geese start arriving at the Sanctuary in early October and are often referred to as the "Fraser-Skagit” flock or subpopulation, as they move back and forth between the estuaries of the Fraser and Skagit Rivers. The Sanctuary is in the center of the Fraser River estuary. The Skagit River estuary is just south of the Canada/United States border in the State of Washington, and it provides the birds with similar habitats to what they find in the Fraser River estuary- flat farmland next to extensive intertidal marshes. Each area traditionally supports approximately 50% of the flock in the fall, but nearly all of the flock concentrates in the Skagit estuary from late December to February. Birds return to the Fraser estuary in spring, and depart in April for their northward migration to Wrangel Island. Nesting pairs are on their nests and incubating eggs most of June, and the resulting young are ready to fly by late August.

During their stay here, favourite natural foods for these birds are the intertidal marsh plants of the estuary. Marsh plants such as bulrush (Scirpus americanus) store starch reserves in their roots and rhizomes. The geese dig up these food sources using their strong bills. The soils in the Delta area are rich in iron compounds, and stain the head feathers of the geese orange when they have been digging in the marsh. In the spring, the green growth of pastures and marsh plants such as sedge (Carex lyngbeyi) are popular foods.

Agricultural crops are also eaten, although most are harvested by farmers before the snow geese arrive. Leftover potatoes often remain in the fields, and the geese dig these up. Local farmers all participate in a program called “Greenfields” which coordinates the fall planting of green growing grass cover for these geese, other wildlife and soil enrichment through the Delta Farmland and Wildlife Trust.

The snow geese provide spectacular wildlife viewing for our visitors. They form very large dense flocks of up to 20,000 birds which feed, rest and fly over the Sanctuary, neighbouring farmland and nearby Fraser marshes every day. They are restless and constantly moving when Bald Eagles, people and dogs are nearby. Within the flocks, visitors can often identify family groups. The young born that year are fully grown before they migrate to this area, but their first set of adult feathers is grey, not white. Small groups containing two white birds and several darker birds are likely family groups. The snow geese regularly sleep on the water in large dense flocks, sometimes out in the marshes of the estuary, and sometimes in the quiet river channels around the Sanctuary.

The gray whale is a baleen whale or filter feeder and have 2-4 throat grooves, about 5 feet (1.4 m) long each. These grooves allow their throat to expand during the huge intake of water during filter feeding. The baleen plates in the gray whale's jaws have about 160 pairs of short, smooth baleen plates. The largest plates are about 15 inches long and 10 inches wide. The baleen bristles are thicker than those of the other baleen whales and are gray with yellowish bristles. The huge, narrow, pink tongue of the gray whale is used to dislodge the food from the baleen, and weighs about 1-1.5 tons (0.9-1.36 tonnes).

The gray whale's skin is usually gray with some blotchy white spots and has many parasites, including hundreds of pounds of barnacles and whale lice. There are little or no parasites on its right side because of the way it scrapes along the ocean bottom to feed.

They have a layer of blubber up to 10 inches (25 cm) thick and there are hairy bristles (vibrassae) on the gray whale's snout and the front of the head. These are used as tactile sensors, like cat's whiskers.

The gray whale has two broad flippers, no dorsal fin, and a series of small ridges along the its back near the flukes (tail).

Bibliography.

• www.wikipedia.org

• http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1023/

• www.monolith.com

• www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Wrangel_Island.aspx

• Article: 'Dwarf' mammoths outlived last ice age'

from: Science News 

March 27, 1993

Bower, Bruce

15