Alaska Sea Grant has received new federal funds to help develop aquaculture projects in Alaska and to work with partners on regional and national priorities. It’s part of a $16 million award from National Sea Grant that will fund 42 collaborative aquaculture projects across the country.

Alaska Sea Grant and the Aleutians East Borough will partner on a project to launch a pilot seaweed farm near Sand Point on the Alaska Peninsula, with a $99,800 grant from National Sea Grant, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Melissa Good, Alaska Sea Grant’s Marine Advisory agent in Unalaska, will lead the project in coordination with Charlotte Levy of the Aleutians East Borough. Community members and high school students will receive training to help set up and run the farm.

Developing a seaweed or kelp industry is a priority for the region to help diversify an economy centered on commercial fishing and processing.

“This could be a valuable off-season opportunity for our fishermen to have supplemental income,” said Levy, natural resource assistant director for the Aleutians East Borough.

The region includes thousands of miles of pristine coastline and is ideal for kelp farming. It has naturally occurring kelp, a workforce with transferable skills and equipment, existing infrastructure and proximity to processing facilities, Levy said.

“Sand Point will be the first location, but other potential farm sites will be considered in communities like Akutan and False Pass,” said Good.

Alaska Sea Grant is also part of a new $587,000 grant to jump-start a cross-Pacific regional collaborative hub. The regional hub will integrate research, outreach and education on traditional indigenous aquaculture like fish ponds in Hawai‘i and clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. Washington Sea Grant is leading the project, working with Alaska and Hawai‘i Sea Grant programs and others.

Aquaculture has the potential to increase local seafood production, strengthen community access to traditional and customary foods, and deepen collaborative engagement between Sea Grant and local communities. Aquaculture can also help communities adapt to climate change by enhancing their food security.

“We look forward to working with Alaska Native tribal partners and synthesizing cross-Pacific aquaculture practices,” said Ginny Eckert, acting director of Alaska Sea Grant.

Finally, Alaska Sea Grant is also a partner on a new $1 million initiative led by Connecticut Sea Grant to create a National Sea Grant “seaweed hub.” The goal is to nurture the successful growth of a domestic seaweed industry by removing barriers and promoting opportunities. The hub would serve as a central clearing house for science, information and other resources related to seaweed farming to help guide interested parties.

The nationwide economic benefit of Sea Grant’s investment in aquaculture in 2018 was $65 million, including sustaining or creating 841 jobs and 345 businesses. In 2019, Sea Grant employed or partially funded 111 professionals working on aquaculture around the country to study, communicate, identify needs or transfer research to industry members.

Alaska Sea Grant is part of the state of Alaska’s mariculture task force, an advisory group that works with state, federal, tribal, industry and other stakeholders to create a thriving mariculture economy in the state. The task force released a strategic plan in 2018 with recommendations for how Alaska could grow a mariculture industry worth $100 million by 2040.

Housed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Alaska Sea Grant is a partnership between the university and NOAA and is one of 33 Sea Grant programs across the country. Alaska Sea Grant has Marine Advisory agents in eight coastal communities across Alaska. They assist coastal residents by providing information and expertise in areas including aquaculture, marine education, seafood processing, direct marketing of seafood, algal toxins, climate change adaptation and more.

ON THE WEB: alaskaseagrant.org

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Melissa Good, 907-561-1876, melissa.good@alaska.edu

After reading my column about biologists who once stocked a Southeast Alaska island with wolves, a reader mailed me a book. In it, the author detailed people’s attempts to import raccoons, wild pigs and other creatures to Alaska.

In addition to well-known events like the recent introduction of wood bison to the Innoko River country, Tom Paul wrote about smaller creatures people have over the years let loose onto beaches and into the woods of Alaska.

Raccoons are not native to Alaska, but people have brought them here a few times, Paul wrote in “Game Transplants in Alaska,” an updated version of an Alaska Department of Fish and Game report first written by Oliver Burris and Donald McKnight in the early 1970s.

In 1941, a man captured eight raccoons in Indiana. He let them go on Singa Island, off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island. The animals, probably surviving on crabs, mussels and other shellfish, lived for many years on Singa and nearby El Capitan islands. Raccoons may still persist there, but other introductions of raccoons, like those released on Japonski Island near Sitka in 1950, did not seem to stick.

Why would someone bring raccoons to Alaska? For their fur, which could be harvested and sold. That was also the idea behind a marten transplant sponsored by the territory of Alaska in 1934. Crews of Alaska Natives captured 17 martens near Ketchikan and Petersburg, releasing 10 of them on Prince of Wales and seven of them on Baranof Island, neither of which had martens. The cat-like animals must have found the habitat to their liking, because martens continue to thrive in both places.

Another successful marten relocation happened in September 1952, when biologists executing a federal project live-trapped marten near Lake Minchumina and transported them south to Afognak Island north of Kodiak. Biologists captured 20 animals from an area north of Denali Park with a reputation for high-quality furs. The descendants of those Interior animals are now scampering over Afognak Island.

To provide food for those martens, people imported red squirrels. A few months before the marten transfer from Minchumina to Afognak Island, hired trappers caught 47 red squirrels around Anchorage and released them on the island.

“This transplant resulted in excellent squirrel populations but it is questionable whether it affected the ultimate success of the marten introduction,” Paul wrote, pointing out that several biologists later showed that martens don’t eat a lot of red squirrels.

Beavers are pretty good at colonizing new areas all by themselves, but Alaskans have helped them along. The first time was when members of the Alaska Game Commission in 1925 offered $50 for each live beaver delivered to an office in Cordova, for transport to Kodiak Island, which then had no beavers. Trappers delivered 34 live beavers to the office, but 10 escaped or died before biologists could release them on Kodiak. The remaining 24 seemed to have liked Kodiak, which now has a healthy population, as well as nearby Raspberry and Afognak islands, where people transported them in later efforts.

In summer and fall of 1925, Cordova trappers also live-captured 100 muskrats for passage to Kodiak. Paul didn’t include any details on how 30 of the muskrats were somehow lost in transit, but the 70 released in lakes of the Kodiak archipelago are the genetic matches of the muskrats that live there now.

Over the years, people have also tried to introduce non-native species to Alaska. A man named Reed Oswalt in 1984 wanted to establish a population of European wild hogs on Marmot Island near Kodiak. Reed released eight hogs he had transported up from California on a 40-acre parcel of land he owned on Marmot Island.

The hogs escaped their confines and spread out over the island. Staffers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game visited and found severe damage to the vegetation. They ordered Reed to remove the hogs from state land. He was either unwilling or unable to do so, but the pigs disappeared anyway. In 1998 a hunter killed the last one on the island.

Biologists have captured and moved sea otters many times, once to save the animals from being nuked. Amchitka Island in the central Aleutians was the site of three underground nuclear blasts in 1965, 1969 and 1971. Alaska biologists convinced officials with the Atomic Energy Commission that moving sea otters from around the island beforehand would be a good idea.

Biologist Jerry Deppa was head of the Amchitka project for a time. He and his team members captured otters in gill nets and later transferring them to bathtub-like kennels. C-130 aircraft landed at Amchitka, which has a long airstrip built in World War II, and carried out sea otters 60 at a time to Annette Island, Sitka and Gustavus. Workers there then loaded the otter kennels into waiting Grumman Goose aircraft to release sites in Southeast Alaska.

“Despite the considerable cleanup that planes required after otter flights, Alaska Airlines, Webber Air in Ketchikan, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all made their Grumman Goose aircraft available at short notice throughout the summer for the transplants,” Paul wrote.

Those relocated Amchitka otters, along with otters moved to Southeast in other efforts, helped the animals recover from the fur-trade days of the 1800s, after which there were no otters there. More than 25,000 otters now live in Southeast Alaska.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

A new analysis of Kotzebue Sound fish has found that mercury levels in a variety of its subsistence species are safe for unrestricted consumption.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study tested 297 subsistence-caught fish, which included eight species — chum salmon, fourhorn sculpin, least cisco, humpback whitefish, starry flounder, Pacific herring, Pacific tomcod and sheefish. The average mercury levels for each species were at levels considered safe by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

Local residents have wondered about mercury levels in the Kotzebue Sound in recent years, due in part to discharges from the Red Dog Mine, which is located about 80 miles inland. Its presence has contributed to questions about the safety of Kotzebue-area subsistence foods.

The study was initiated by the Native Village of Kotzebue, which contacted Todd O’Hara, a UAF professor of veterinary toxicology and pharmacology. Researchers worked with local subsistence fishermen, who donated a variety of Kotzebue Sound fish species from their catches in 2105, 2016 and 2018 for testing.

Of the hundreds of samples tested, only four individual fish exceeded the “unrestricted consumption” levels set by state officials. The average mercury levels in each species were well below that threshold.

UAF researcher Andrew Cyr, who wrote about the study for the journal Environmental Research this month, said the results are consistent with other data that show fish throughout Alaska are safe for consumption with respect to mercury levels.

The study also compared mercury levels to those recorded in Kotzebue Sound fish 15 years ago. It found no increase in concentrations of the contaminant during that time, an indication that mercury hasn’t increased in the food web.

“There’s a lot of information and misinformation about fish and mercury, but the vast majority of fish in Alaska are safe for consumption,” said Cyr, who began the study as a doctoral student and now works for UAF’s Biomedical Learning and Student Training program. “The nutritional benefits of consuming Alaska fish far outweigh the risk of mercury.”

Cyr and other researchers have discussed their findings at several events in Kotzebue during the past year, including outreach at Kotzebue schools, a fish clinic and a local radio show.

Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue, said subsistence users in the area have been interested in mercury levels in local fish for more than 20 years. He called the new data “another valuable contribution to our ongoing interest in mercury and marine biota.”

“It is as much an effort to document baselines for future comparative studies as it is for understanding current levels and any areas for consumptive concerns,” said Whiting, who also contributed to the study.

Other contributors to the study included UAF researchers Andres Lopez and Matthew Wooller, and Alaska State Veterinarian Robert Gerlach.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Andrew Cyr, 907-474-5111, acyr1@alaska.edu

NOTE TO EDITORS: The full Environmental Research paper is available online at http://bit.ly/uaf0923192

The University of Alaska Fairbanks and UAF Alumni Association are accepting nominations for the 2020 Distinguished Alumnus Award and William R. Cashen Service Award.

Award winners are selected by a committee of alumni, past recipients and members of UAF’s leadership team. Both awards will be presented at the Blue and Gold Celebration, scheduled for Feb. 8, 2020, in Fairbanks.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award was first presented in 1962 and each year recognizes one living alumnus for meritorious service on behalf of UAF, distinguished accomplishments in business and professional life, or distinguished human service in community affairs. Nominations should include information on the candidate’s life achievements. Only UAF alumni are eligible to receive the honor; however, anyone may make a nomination.

The William R. Cashen Service Award is named after the late Willam R. “Bill” Cashen, a member of the class of 1937. He was a former alumni director, professor, public servant and proud alumnus. Cashen, the author of “Farthest North College President,” set an example for service to the university and its alumni association. The Cashen Award is designed to inspire all those associated with UAF. Both alumni and nonalumni qualify for the award.

The nomination period is open until Nov. 30, 2019. Nomination forms are available online at https://uaf.edu/alumni/get-involved/awards-scholarships/nominate.php or at the alumni office in Constitution Hall Room 201 on the Fairbanks campus. For more information, call the UAF alumni office at 907-474-7081.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Theresa Bakker, 907-474-7081, theresabakker@alaska.edu

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has announced the students named to the deans’ and chancellor’s lists for the summer 2019 semester. The lists recognize students’ outstanding academic achievements.

Students receiving a 3.9 grade point average or higher are placed on the chancellor’s list, while those receiving a grade point average of between 3.5 and 3.89 are named to the deans’ list.

UAF is a Land, Sea and Space Grant institution, and is the leading doctoral degree-granting institution in the state of Alaska. Since it was founded in 1917, UAF has been internationally recognized for research relating to the Arctic and sub-Arctic, in areas such as biology, geophysics, engineering, natural resources and global climate change.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Students who have earned academic honors but have requested that their directory information remain confidential may not appear on the public honors list.

• Chancellor’s list
• Deans’ list

More than 100 volcanoes pimple the adolescent skin of Alaska, spreading from ear to ear. Some are loud, flamboyant and obnoxious. Others are sneaky and quiet, escaping notice until a pilot sees a gray plume that wasn’t there yesterday.

Because people live on the slopes of these volcanoes and thousands more fly through their blast zones each day, scientists want to forecast eruptions with more precision.

For the past 30 years, scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory have had their fingers on the pulse of volcanoes, looking for signs of shakiness and sending out alerts when something is going on. On an early October 2019 day, for example, AVO’s webpage showed that Cleveland, Semisopochnoi and Shishaldin volcanoes were all a bit restless.

When an eruption happens, scientists with the observatory use all their information streams to get warnings out. Their tools include seismometers planted into volcano flanks, satellites that send back infrared pixels of hotspots, GPS units that show volcanoes inflating like balloons, gas sensors that tell what is wafting from a crater, microphones on volcanoes that hear explosions, and rocks and ash collected from mountainsides.

That’s a firehose of information, and scientists are happy to have it all. There is so much, though, that researchers rarely get to all of it before another eruption happens.

A team of them will set up four Ph.D. students to dig into that data paydirt, to see if they can find a key to better eruption forecasts.

Taryn Lopez is one of the scientists who is looking for those graduate students.

“We’re pretty good at saying an eruption is going to happen,” she said of the current state of Alaska volcano monitoring. “We’re not so good at predicting how big it will be or how long it will last.”

Lopez, an expert on volcanic gases at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, thinks students combing all this information on eight specific Alaska volcanoes might come up with something other busy people have missed.

“If we put our tools together, we can say a lot more,” she said.

She and her teammates on the project, including her husband David Fee, the coordinating scientist of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, have chosen eight Alaska volcanoes for a closer look. Four of them — Okmok, Bogoslof, Augustine and Redoubt — are the somewhat predictable big-mouth variety that tend to spew ash way up where jets are flying great-circle routes.

The other four are sneaky ones — Cleveland, Shishaldin, Pavlof and Veniaminof — all of which have also disrupted air traffic in the past with little warning.

“If we could make any progress on forecasting these eruptions, that would be a big breakthrough,” she said.

To get there, Lopez and team members Ronni Grapenthin, Jessica Larsen and Pavel Izbekov are looking for Ph.D. students who will spend four years mining for clues given by the eight volcanoes. As the National Science Foundation-funded study matures, they will hire two postdoctoral researchers to condense the others’ results into eruption-forecasting models.

Later, on deadline, Alaska Volcano Observatory scientists might plug information into those models and get better answers on how big an eruption will be and how long jets might be grounded from flying over Alaska airspace.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus and ecologist Terry Chapin has been named the 2019 recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize.

The prize, in its 30th year, recognizes one person worldwide for outstanding scientific discoveries in the areas of environmental science and sustainable development. The prize includes a cash sum of 1.5 million Swedish kronor, or about $150,000, and will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on Nov. 7.

“Throughout his decades-long career in ecosystems research and global change, Professor Terry Chapin has worked tirelessly with people and for the planet,” members of the prize jury noted in a written statement. “His work will have a long-lasting impact on the ways we seek to build a sustainable future, with the concept of ‘Earth stewardship’ supporting the deep institutional and structural change required to meet the challenges ahead.”

Chapin began his career as a biology instructor with the Peace Corps in Bogota, Columbia. Afterward, he completed his doctorate at Stanford University. He accepted a faculty position at UAF in 1973.

His early research focused on plants and how they adapted to changing conditions in the North. His scope expanded over time as he realized that understanding one part of an ecosystem requires understanding it holistically. From that realization, the focus of his research and teaching shifted.

He began to approach his work from the perspective of what he would eventually call “Earth stewardship.”

“Earth stewardship is shaping the future relationship between people and nature to the benefit of both,” Chapin said, which is important in the face of global change. “It recognizes that this is a severe problem and we need to do things that will shape a more sustainable future and one where society can flourish.”

In 2001, he founded a new graduate program at UAF — the Resilience and Adaptation Program — which aimed to train future scientists to take an interdisciplinary approach to studying global change.

“Terry Chapin’s vision is that training of young ecologists should be across the biological and social sciences and include gaining experience working with communities, their leadership, and government and industry to guide policymaking to be respectful and inclusive of indigenous knowledge and lead to sustainable and resilient economies,” said Brian Barnes, director of the UAF Institute of Arctic Biology. “I believe this will be his lasting legacy.”

In addition to training new scientists, Chapin has helped individuals learn what they can do in the face of global change.

“I worry that the current gloom and doom disengages people from wanting to take action,” Chapin said. “What I have tried to do is systematically consider the kinds of things that individual citizens can do to try to turn around the relationship between humans and nature.”

That could be establishing a relationship with nature by spending time outdoors and beginning to think more carefully about how their lifestyle influences things on the planet, he said. Or it could mean talking to friends, family members and neighbors about the future of the planet, engaging politically or taking small steps in your own household. His newest book, “Grassroots Stewardship: Sustainability within Our Reach,” expands on the concept and offers achievable action for the average person. The book will be released in early 2020.

“Professor Chapin is truly brilliant and exceptionally insightful in his research, and he is also genuinely kind and generous in sharing his understanding,” said Larry Hinzman, vice chancellor for research at UAF. “He is often sought as a mentor and he is always welcoming to students, journalists, policymakers and anyone with a desire to learn.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Terry Chapin, fschapiniii@alaska.edu. Will Steffen, chairman of the prize jury and professor emeritus at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, will.steffen@anu.edu.au, +61-2-6262-6897, Skype: willsteffen.

ONLINE: http://www.environment-prize.com/

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos of Chapin and a short video clip are available for download at http://bit.ly/terrychapinVEP.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks will host the fourth Tribal Governance Symposium from Nov. 5-7. With a theme of “Living Tribal Stewardship,” the symposium provides a forum to build understanding, relationships and knowledge to advance tribal self-governance.

Keynote speakers will include attorneys and indigenous scholars Elizabeth Saagiluk Hensley and Heather Whiteman Runs Him, who will explore the connections of tribal sovereignty, well-being, spirituality and stewardship. With guidance by elders, facilitated conversations will include topics such as Alaska Native wellness and spirituality; land and water stewardship; tribal fish and wildlife governance; stewardship policy and tribal governance; and climate change.

The symposium is sponsored in part by the UAF Tribal Management Program, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Rural, Community and Alaska Native Education, Tanana Chiefs Conference, UAF Center for One Health Research, and First Alaskans Institute.

Participants are encouraged to preregister to reserve their space. More information and an agenda is available at www.uaf.edu/tribal/tgs/.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher David Denkenberger has been awarded a grant to help commercialize a new patented heat exchanger design.

Heat exchangers transfer heat between liquids and gases and are used in many applications, including power plants, cars and air conditioners. Denkenberger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, created a prototype of his new exchanger using laser welding and plastic garbage bags. The grant will be used to improve, mass produce and commercialize the design.

Denkenberger was awarded a $60,000 grant in September from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. Support from the Alaska Regional Collaboration for Technology Innovation and Commercialization program, an Office of Naval Research initiative, will provide matching funds for the effort.

Moses Lee, the Murdock Trust senior director of scientific research and enrichment programs, said the design is an excellent candidate to pivot from research to commercial applications. In Alaska, such technology may allow coastal communities to use waste heat from diesel generators to power large cooling systems at seafood processing plants.

“Successful implementation of the heat exchanger technology will not only impact refrigeration needs in Alaska, but also worldwide,” Lee said.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Rural Alaska Honors Institute has received a $150,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to support student and program costs.

The Rural Talent Initiative grant will help cover RAHI costs, including transportation, housing, food, salaries and books. The UAF-based summer program was founded in 1983 to prepare rural and Alaska Native high school students for academic excellence and college success.

“Students from rural Alaska are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing and succeeding at universities,” said Brianna Pauling, RAHI program manager. “The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation grant will help us give about 100 students a leg up over the next two years.”

RAHI 2020 program dates are May 26-July 10. The RAHI application will be posted online on Jan. 1. More information is available at www.uaf.edu/rahi or by email at uaf-rahi@alaska.edu.

With a whisper, middle Alaska is undergoing its biggest change of the year.

Billions of snowflakes waft to the dark, wet ground, linking their spiky, broken arms as they collide, settling into a white cushion.

The great albedo change of 2019 might be here. Snow is covering this part of Alaska that gets coldest in winter and warmest in summer, driving it toward the former.

Albedo is a term regarding how much solar radiation a surface bounces back into space. Snow cover encourages colder air temperatures by reflecting the sun’s rays, not letting the dusky ground absorb warmth.

With all the warmth-driven changes to Alaska in the news, this right-on-time snow coverage is comforting, even though we tend to find most changes uncomfortable. A snow-covered landscape feels normal at a time when abnormal crashes the party more and more often.

Here in Fairbanks, this October day has been just cold enough (31 degrees Fahrenheit) to make the precipitation fall as snow rather than rain. The cooling power of a suddenly white world is best felt in a year like 1992, when a foot of snow fell on Fairbanks in mid-September. That persistent coating rejected sunlight so well that low temperatures by the end of that month got down into the single digits Fahrenheit.

Autumn warmth might return if this snow turns to rain, or if a Chinook wind eats all the white, but I am rooting against that. Studying recent warming air temperatures all over the state, scientists have noted that, when compared to the late 1990s, Alaska’s present-day snowpack develops a week later in autumn and melts almost two weeks earlier in the spring. The average date more than one inch of snow endures at Fairbanks International Airport is October 16. That’s also the average date Anchorage receives its first measurable snowfall of 0.1 inches or more.

As I typed this, hour after hour, flake by flake, the ground became cleaner and colder and held the delicate, sharp-edged prints of fox feet. Thoughts drifted to skis, bases still coated with yellow spruce pollen, and blue-tarped snowmachines that will soon have a clean, white ramp to roll upon, leaving behind a short trail of dirt and dry Labrador tea leaves.

Plastic bags launched from the back of pickup trucks will overwinter beneath the snow, indifferent to its magic ability to keep things warm. How warm? A graduate student who monitored the forest-floor next to a hibernating wood frog found that while the air temperature a few feet above the frog dropped to minus 40 F, the temperature that frog experienced under the blanket of snow was above zero.

That difference of 40 degrees is significant in the life of voles and shrews and insects and plants. Those organisms can survive bitter cold with the help of these collected flakes that trap air better than fiberglass insulation, spray foam or any other clever manmade alternative. Snow slows the release of Earth’s heat that the sun recharged in summer. All sorts of living things, including humans with buried water pipes, leverage the power of that natural, white blanket.

Snow also makes for a quieter world. Spruce trees, chief residents of the boreal forest stretching from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean, hold loaves of snow on branches too numerous to count. These suspended cushions sponge up sound waves.

One pleasant noise that penetrates downward is the honks of tundra swans. It is always a surprise in mid- to late October to hear the last of Alaska’s migrating birds heading toward Saskatchewan farm fields.

Sometimes, squinting upward through falling flakes, you see flashes of a V formation, pointed out of Alaska. The swans will not return from their ultimate destinations in northern California and Oregon until next April, when these crystals dissolve in the sunshine.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

Retired Palmer 4-H agent Peter Stortz will be inducted into the National 4-H Hall of Fame on Oct. 11, becoming the sixth Alaskan to receive that honor.

The Hall of Fame recognizes 4-H volunteers, Cooperative Extension Service professionals, staff and others who made a significant impact on the 4-H youth program at the local, state or national level.

Stortz, a professor emeritus with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, will be recognized for his contributions to 4-H, particularly with environmental education. In his nominating letter, Southeast Extension agent Darren Snyder said Stortz is known nationally for his innovative approach to teaching math and science in culturally relevant ways.

Stortz has a long history of working with youths in Alaska that began in 1978 as director of a Youth Conservation Corps camp near Juneau. He served as the director of a 4-H environmental education center in Wisconsin before returning to Alaska in 1989 as the Palmer 4-H agent for the UAF Cooperative Extension Service.

Five years later, he became the statewide 4-H fisheries and natural resource specialist. He inherited a salmon incubation and fisheries education project involving youths in 10 central Yukon River communities. Through the project, teens in Kaltag also got paid for counting salmon for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“It wasn’t just an exercise,” he said. Fish and Game used the students’ daily weir counts  to gauge the strength of the chum and king salmon runs. Their counts were part of the information used to decide when to open and close the commercial and subsistence fishery.

Stortz also trained teachers on how to run a classroom salmon-incubation project that grew to encompass more than 100 Alaska communities. The project evolved into a four-day natural resource education in-service training with other agencies that melded Western science about salmon and traditional knowledge.

“It wasn’t just science from a Western perspective,” he said. “We tried to create culturally meaningful experiences for people in their own classrooms.”

Stortz also coordinated a 4-H teen leadership experience and regularly shared information about his programs with others regionally and nationally.

He said he is honored by the hall of fame recognition and the opportunities he has had in Alaska. Stortz retired in 2013 and continues to volunteer as a judge for 4-H and FFA public speaking contests and at the Alaska State Fair. He plans to attend the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the National 4-H Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with family members. Fifteen others will be inducted.

4-H is a youth program affiliated with the Cooperative Extension Service and has an 89-year history in Alaska.

Stortz’s other retirement activities include compiling a history of Youth Conservation Corps camps in Alaska with comments from former participants.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Peter Stortz, pjstortz@alaska.edu.

In Fairbanks, Joe Nava is pretty much a household name, whether through his work as a gun safety instructor, as host of the local radio program “Shooters Corner,” or as the creator of the Youth Hunter Education Challenge.

What might not be so well known are Nava’s longtime ties to the University of Alaska Fairbanks — as a student, athlete, administrator and, as of 2009, a member of the Nanook Hall of Fame.

“The university set me up with two degrees,” said Nava, who has been affiliated with UAF for 56 years. “This helped in my earning power to take care of my family.”

Nava has enough stories to fill a book, something he accomplished last year when he penned an autobiography, “Not Your Average Joe,” with the help of his friend, Laura B. Berkowitz. All of the proceeds support the Joseph A. Nava Shooting Scholarship Endowment Fund, a UAF scholarship he helped endow more than 30 years ago.

Nanooks Rifle coach Layne Lewis said that Nava’s ongoing role as a rifle team booster and fan have left a lasting impression.

“Joe has been very influential with the university and our rifle program,” Lewis said. “The amount that Joe has done for the Nanooks is immeasurable.”

Nava moved from Massachusetts to Alaska in 1960, joined by his four children and a very pregnant wife, Grace. He was set on pursuing his dream of working as a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

He had written to wildlife departments in all 49 states before deciding on Alaska. The only other responses he received offered positions as a junior biologist. In Alaska, Nava was hired as a biologist, minus the junior, and sent to Tok to begin his work.

Although he thrived in that position, Nava knew he would never be promoted without a college degree. Nava and his family relocated to Fairbanks in 1961, where he could complete his undergraduate degree from the University of Alaska in wildlife management.

He was both a part-time employee for ADF&G, working 37 hours a week, and a full-time student. Because the Fish and Game headquarters was located on campus, Nava was able to work in the lab, run to class and then return to the lab to continue his work. He also shot for the rifle team for three seasons, serving as Blue and Gold captain and being named a first-team All-American.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Nava decided to also pursue his master’s degree at UAF, focusing on the reproductive cycles of lynx. When his research began, the population of wild hare, a main food source for the lynx, was low. As he set out to capture lynx specimens in the spring when they should be pregnant, he noticed that none of them had kits.

His research led to a better understanding lynx reproduction. While a fox might continue to breed normally when food sources are scarce, a lynx will stop producing offspring until food sources return. Nava realized that a lynx will adapt in order to ensure her offspring will survive.

“I got letters from all over the world,” he said. “From biologists who wanted to ask questions and take off from what I had learned. I was the first one to realize that when the food source is short, the lynx don’t breed.”

During his thesis research, Nava held a full-time position at UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology, where he remained until retirement. Since then, Nava has taught field safety classes to researchers each spring, including firearm and bear safety courses.

Their bodies cooling with the October air, wood frogs are now snug in leafy blankets all over Alaska.

Down there inside those thumb-size frogs, even smaller creatures are hitching a ride. These tiny parasites have the power to make frogs develop up to a dozen extra legs, or no legs at all.

Don Larson just defended his University of Alaska Ph.D. thesis on the fate of wood frogs that are at this moment becoming camouflage ice cubes. While taking a course in physiology of northern creatures, he became fascinated with the parasites attached to some wood frogs. How could a creature that leeches off another organism endure that animal freezing solid?

Wood frogs, which exist from the Brooks Range all the way south to Georgia, are the only amphibians in northern Alaska. Larson’s advisor Brian Barnes years ago found that the Alaska version of the wood frog is special, able to tolerate frigid temperatures under the snow that would kill Lower 48 wood frogs.

They do it by becoming sweet.

Right now, frogs are freezing and thawing with the daily swings of air temperature. Larson found that with each nip of frost, frogs’ livers produce more glucose. That glucose floods their bodies, helping them avoid the cell dehydration that happens when we get frostbite.

Alaska wood frogs are fine out there, even though their brains and eyes and legs will soon be frozen solid.

“This animal has no heartbeat,” Larson said. “In a lot of ways, it’s not a living organism.”

After a half year in the living-dead stage, wood frogs thaw in springtime and hop away to a nearby breeding pond as if nothing happened.

During his research, Larson collected 18 wood frogs in Fairbanks and fit them with tiny glue-on transmitters. He then let them go and tracked them to crevices on the forest floor where they stopped moving in fall. For two years, he checked the temperatures where they hibernated, finding that even when Fairbanks air dropped to minus 40 F, the frog-level temperature under a cushion of snow was still above zero.

Larson loves frogs, but he was even more interested in a parasite that lives part of its life in Alaska ponds and lakes. Ribeiroia ondatrae is —  for part of its life — an oversized head with a whip tail. In ponds and lakes and puddles, it torpedoes into tadpoles, occasionally embedding itself near where a frog’s legs will emerge. Sometimes, a developing frog will react to the irritant by growing extra legs.

Why would a parasite do that to the animal upon which it depends?

“They want to create a zombie,” Larson said. “This parasite wants this frog to be eaten.”

Ribeiroia ondatrae needs three other animals to complete its life cycle. It first requires a bird like a sandhill crane to eat an infected frog, which maybe is not moving well with those extra legs. Then it needs the crane to poop out adult parasites into water, which produce eggs that hatch into little blobs.

Snails eat those blobs. Within snails, the parasites multiply like crazy, then depart as tadpole-seeking missiles, usually entering them through the anus or gills.

Why would anything evolve to rely on three other organisms?

“It’s like living with mom and dad well after high school,” Larson said. “The food, housing and transport are all taken care of for parasites. They only need to expend energy to avoid the host’s immune system, and reproduce.”

Though Larson did not find a deformed frog in Fairbanks, he found that the parasites can survive in overwintering wood frogs. He thinks the parasites endure winter by “hijacking” a frog’s glucose strategy. He wonders, if the air keeps warming, if the parasites will take that as an advantage, leading to more greenish zombies skittering through Alaska wetlands.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Management awarded $30,000 in cash prizes after the 2019 Arctic Innovation Competition’s final presentations Saturday, Oct. 19.

The competition, now in its 11th year, invites innovators to propose new, feasible and potentially profitable ideas for solving real-life problems and challenges.

The top prize of $10,000 in the main division, for ages 18 and up, was awarded to Todd Krieg for Fish Wheel Salmon Selector. The selector improves on the classic fish wheel by safely returning coho and chinook salmon to the river to continue spawning while allowing other, more abundant species to be harvested. The process will allow Interior Alaska fishermen much longer fishing times and larger harvest numbers while still satisfying responsible management practices.

In the junior division for youth ages 13 to 17 years old, James Price took home the first prize of $1,000 for Plug-Hug, a faceplate for electrical outlets. The device’s snugly fitting shield makes accidental unplugging and weather damage less likely.

In the cub division for youth ages 12 and under, Aila Standlee-Strom won first place and $500 for Here Kitty Cat, a cat harness with a locator connected to an app. The app gives walking directions for owners to find their cats.

Top prize and honorable mention winners in the three divisions came from communities across Alaska — Anchorage, Auke Bay, Ester, Fairbanks, North Pole, Unalakleet — and from as far away as Hays, Kansas, and Hershey, Pennsylvania. A complete list of winners is available on the AIC website.

ON THE WEB: www.arcticinno.com

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Tammy Tragis-McCook, 907-474-7042, tammy.tragis@alaska.edu

A new online scientific resource will document changing permafrost conditions at the sub-meter scale throughout the Arctic, providing researchers, educators and the public with new opportunities for exploration and discovery.

The Permafrost Discovery Gateway, funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant from the Navigating the New Arctic initiative, will use satellite images and high-performance computing to document and display a variety of changes in the Arctic. Phenomena such as coastal erosion, landslides and thawing ice-rich permafrost will be combined with air temperature and precipitation maps. Together, the resource will help users form a detailed picture of Arctic change with a focus on thawing permafrost, providing information that can ultimately help inform policies and management in the Arctic.

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Connecticut, and the Arctic Data Center at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis will lead the development of this online resource. They’ll work with the Alfred Wegener Institute, NASA, the Center for Climate and Health at Alaska Pacific University, and the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota.

UAF researcher Anna Liljedahl, the project leader, said the platform will be a user-friendly tool to explore a region that is being rapidly altered by climate change. The four-year effort, which will begin on Nov. 1, will be designed for use by both scientists and the public.

The online resource will include tools for visualization, analysis and processing of big imagery. Those features will allow users to document, explore and understand changes that have occurred in the Arctic, both large and small.

“The Permafrost Discovery Gateway will be a place for people to play with big datasets so that diverse peoples can create knowledge that is useful for them,” said Liljedahl, who works at UAF’s Water and Environmental Research Center.

Researchers from around the world have been collecting data about the Arctic for decades, including some of the information that will be used in the project. The Permafrost Discovery Gateway aims to make this information more accessible to everyone, since it is otherwise scattered across various locations or is too large to explore without technical expertise or access to supercomputers.

Liljedahl said an early version of the Permafrost Discovery Gateway will be available within a year. The research team will add features, refine the design and populate the online resource as the project continues, while gathering user feedback to guide its evolution.

“I think it’s unlike anything out there,” Liljedahl said. “Our combination of resources within the gateway can finally help people keep up with the rapidly changing Arctic landscape as it is transforming and at a scale that is relevant to people.”

The project webpage is available at https://permafrost.arcticdata.io/.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Anna Liljedahl, akliljedahl@alaska.edu

A few times each week, someone carries something dead or alive through the doors of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, hoping an expert can identify it.

A couple weeks ago, a woman arrived with a small jar of what appeared to be white worms. People at the museum’s front desk called Derek Sikes up from his office.

Sikes is an insect specialist. He has traveled from the Aleutians to the Arctic to Southeast Alaska to find them. Worms are not insects, but Sikes takes a look at earthworms and other semi-exotic Alaska creatures people bring in because he is the closest thing to a worm person at the museum.

Sikes inspected the vial.

“I thought, ‘Whoa, those look a little rotten and won’t be of use to us,’” he said.

Cynthia Pflughoeft, who works at Eielson Air Force Base’s coal-fired power plant and found the worms near a cooling pond, studied parasites in college.

“I think these are flatworms,” she said to Sikes.

Pflughoeft then showed Sikes a photo on her phone showing the creatures in a fresher state, where she found them on the forest floor. They resembled pad Thai rice noodles. For all his crawling on the floor of Alaska, Sikes was stumped, and intrigued.

“This was something from the X-Files,” he said.

Organisms not yet documented still exist on planet Earth, and Sikes has found a few, but he also knows how rare that kind of discovery is.

For an answer, he asked the masses, posting Pflughoeft’s photos on Facebook. Many of his friends on that platform are also experts on small living things. They suggested ideas, including that it was a parasite, but there was no consensus.

Sikes sent the photos to Don Larson, who just defended his UAF Ph.D. research on parasites that live within wood frogs. Larson’s first thought was tapeworm, but from the photos he could not see the segmented bodies tapeworms have.

“It looked like a snotball,” Larson said. “When I have no idea what something is, I think that maybe it’s a slime mold.”

Sikes also suspected the organism might be a slime mold, a term for yucky, gelatinous bodies that scientists once lumped in with fungi but now are residents of the kingdom Protista. But a mycologist familiar with slime molds said the creature looked nothing like any slime mold he had ever seen.

After posting the white ribbons on the website iNaturalist.org, Sikes read some interesting responses but nothing rock solid. He also suspected it might be a parasite because it was white, the color of organisms that live in worlds with no light, like deep in caves or inside other animals.

Sikes then used another tool he keeps around, an animal DNA identification kit that is available for about $40 from Lifescanner.net. He sent two samples of the white worms to a lab operated by the company. In a few weeks, he got a response from the company: Cynthia Pflughoeft had found tapeworms.

Fish tapeworms to be exact. Sikes’ colleague Matt Bowser checked a larger DNA database and narrowed the identification to the species Ligula intestinalis. More digging brought up a single Alaska reference, by a researcher who had found Ligula intestinalis in an Alaska rainbow trout in 1957. One X-Files case closed.

How did the tapeworms get to the forest floor, not far from a power-plant cooling pond? That remains a mystery, but this parasite, like the frog parasite Don Larson studied, needs three other life forms to survive. Ligula intestinalis is a tapeworm that lives in the guts of fish and fish-eating birds. The third animal it lives within is a copepod, a tiny crustacean that fish eat.

It’s possible that a bird, maybe an osprey or gull, ate a fish with these tapeworms (which may have been swimming erratically because of them). The worms could have somehow exited the fish before the bird ate the fish. Or the worms could have come from inside the bird itself.

Though people like Cynthia Pflughoeft are fascinated by parasites, most of us cringe at the mention of them. But researchers that study parasites will tell you that ecosystems with parasites are healthier than those without. When there are no parasites, or very few parasites, then an animal they rely upon must be missing from the landscape.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

A promising new tool for stroke research has earned University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Bahareh Barati a Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Institutes of Health.

Barati has a background studying therapeutic hypothermia, which works to understand the body chemistry of hibernating animals to develop treatments for brain injuries. The $347,000 NIH award will help Barati create a better way to monitor brain function and diseases in laboratory animals.

Barati, who has worked at UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology since 2013, said the most common techniques for brain scans are either designed for humans or prohibitively expensive to use on small animals. That has made it difficult for researchers to evaluate whether stroke treatments on rats and mice are effective before moving to expensive clinical trials.

To fill that gap, Barati developed her own scaled-down optical imaging device. It includes a tiny probe that the animal wears on its head, which is attached to a thumb-sized processor inside a rat-sized jacket. The technology allows researchers to monitor brain function while animals go about their daily activity, without further surgeries or anesthesia.

“It’s very challenging — you have to miniaturize the entire technique,” Barati said. “We hope with this technology we can determine the extent of the injury and whether the treatment improves it.”

The NIH funding will help Barati refine her prototype and conduct feasibility studies. Part of the award will also fund associated research at UAF and the University of Pittsburgh.

Barati started her own biotech company to create the imaging device, and is working with UAF’s Center for Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship to develop the product.

Thousands of researchers around the world are conducting stroke studies and other research on brain injuries, she said, which provides a large potential customer base. She said that guidance from Center ICE and NIH I-Corps training will help her connect with those researchers and create a product they can use.

“We’re from academia, not business,” she said. “These kinds of programs are helpful for exposing you to that world.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Bahareh Barati, 907-474-7514, zbarati@alaska.edu

KUAC FM will be off the air Wednesday, Oct. 30, for six to eight hours starting around 10 a.m., weather permitting, to tune up its new transmitter and antenna on Ester Dome.

During the outage, listeners can receive KUAC FM by livestreaming at KUAC.org on their computers, smartphones or tablets; tuning into KUAC TV 9.6; using the National Public Radio app on their smartphones or tablets; or asking their smart speakers to play KUAC.

Fairbanks and surrounding communities, along with Nenana, Delta Junction and Healy, will be affected by the outage. Bettles, Eagle, Nome and Tok will still receive KUAC FM over the air.

KUAC is a public broadcasting station operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Authors of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, delivered a stunning alarm bell for our planet’s oceans and frozen landscapes, one that may ring uncomfortably loud in Alaskans’ ears. Hundreds of government delegates from 195 member countries approved the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate in September 2019.

The report details the most up-to-date understanding of climate change, how critical the oceans and frozen parts of the Earth are to our well-being, the rapid changes they are undergoing and what we can do to help build a sustainable future. It includes a plain-language summary for policymakers.

Regine Hock, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is a coordinating lead author for a chapter on high-mountain areas. Gary Kofinas, from the UAF Institute of Arctic Biology, was an author on a chapter on polar regions.

“The results of this report are very relevant for Alaska,” Hock said. “It essentially affects every single person in Alaska, one way or another.”

The Earth has, on average, warmed more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, largely due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The report shows overwhelming evidence that the consequences are profound.

The ocean, a critical regulator of Earth’s temperature, has absorbed a large percentage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and more than 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system. These adjustments help regulate global temperatures, but the ocean can’t keep up.

Oceans are now warmer, more acidic and less productive. As temperatures rise, melting glaciers and ice sheets cause sea-level rise. Extreme coastal events are becoming more frequent.

The report includes extensive work from social scientists who focused on how changes to these systems will affect humans. Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain about 97 percent of the Earth’s water. Ten percent of Earth’s land area is covered by glaciers or ice sheets.

More than 1.2 billion people, over 20% of the world’s population, live in high-mountain regions and low-lying coastal zones. In addition, 4 million people live in the Arctic. They are all directly affected by changes in the oceans and cryosphere — the frozen parts of the planet.

Alaska will feel the effects from climate change more than most.

Glaciers, snow, ice and permafrost are prominent features of this landscape. Alaska also has 33,000 miles of coastline, the longest of any state. Rapidly rising and warming oceans are already eroding shores and changing sea ice. Changes are predicted to become more severe.

“Alaska is really a hotspot because warming is more pronounced than the globe’s average and the cryosphere is everywhere,” Hock said.

There are potential positive changes, such as the opening of new shipping lanes as sea ice melts, but, overall, the outlook is negative.

For example, climate change may make a large dent in the tourism industry, a key economic sector in Alaska. In Alaska, one out of every 10 jobs is in tourism, which provides more than $1.5 billion in labor income and $4.5 billion in economic output.

Alaska is projected to lose 30% to 50% of its glacial mass by the end of the century. As glaciers retreat, water temperatures rise, which affects salmon populations. This could mean fewer tourist dollars and jobs tied to both sport fishing and glacier sightseeing.

On a larger scale, Alaska’s glaciers are also a major contributor to sea level rise. About 12 percent of all glacier runoff in the world comes from Alaska.

“I think this is really important for people in Alaska to realize,” Hock said. “OK, we have all these changes, physical changes that people might have heard about — like glacier retreat or sea-level rise — but there are also direct impacts on livelihoods, on hazards, on economies, on tourism and on infrastructure.”