Big things come in small packages
Researcher awarded for work studying the North's more often overlooked 'little guys'
Miranda Scotland
Northern News Services
Published Monday, December 1, 2014
NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
It's hard to believe that a mouse or a lemming wields more power than a 1,000-pound beast with enormous paws and razor sharp claws.
Yet, this is the case, says ecologist Charles Krebs.
"It's the little guys that we think of as not terribly important but really in terms of the whole ecosystem they're driving things," says Krebs, whose spent decades studying mammals in the North.
"If caribou disappeared from Northern Canada you wouldn't see one change in the system ... But we don't want them to disappear. They're iconic beasts. You could say the same thing about any of our beasts, polar bears and so on."
Just as lemmings fail to awe the masses, so does ecology. It's not as sexy as space nor does it pull at the heartstrings like health sciences.
"I think it's the feeling that most people operate on the assumption, if you put it crudely, that mother nature will look after herself so we don't really need to do anything much out there with management," says Krebs.
"The governments will say we don't have money ... I think it means you're ignoring the ecological world and putting the economic world ahead of it all. I think it's a problem in the North and I don't know how to turn it around."
But there are bright spots, says Krebs.
One of them is the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, an organization that "champions Northern research."
In late October, the foundation awarded Krebs with the $50,000 Weston family prize for lifetime achievement in Northern research for his "outstanding" body of work.
Krebs has produced hundreds of scientific articles and other publications, including a widely used textbook titled Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance.
His first thesis work was on the reindeer herd the Government of Canada purchased from Alaska in 1929 and had herded to the Mackenzie Delta. The intention was to provide a reliable source of food to indigenous peoples.
The government would look after the main herd while smaller herds would be created and entrusted to "suitable" aboriginal persons in the area.
"While the landscape could have been able to support them, (local people) weren't very keen on this lifestyle, so you really had a social problem. It's not what they wanted to do with their lives. And if you didn't herd them the wolves picked them off one-by-one," said Krebs. "The whole thing fell into disrepair."
Today, only one reindeer herd is left in the NWT.
Later on, Krebs turned his attention to studying small mammal population cycles.
In particular, he's carried out studies to determine why snowshoe hare populations in Canada and Alaska fall every 10 years or so.
He and his colleagues have determined that the number of predators affect snowshoe hare populations, not only because they kill the animals but also by causing them stress.
That stress is then passed from mothers to their babies through hormones. As a result, the mothers and their babies breed less.
"So stress carries on with a maternal effect, which is to say it's not genetic. It's something that happens to your mother and it's transmitted to you through hormones. So, that has opened up a whole line of research and a whole lot of different creatures looking at the effects of stress on subsequent performance," says Krebs. "The same thing is happening in fish, it's happening in frogs, it's happening in mammals and you realize it's also happening in people... You have all sorts of effects in humans I expect that aren't often recognized."
More recently, Krebs' main focus has been on the community ecological monitoring program in the Yukon, the purpose of which is to look at all the components of the food web and capture environmental changes.
"With something like climate change, which is going to go on for several hundred years, it might be quite useful to have data from 2014."
Weledeh MLA Bob Bromley says he believes Krebs is one of the great biologists of our time. The two met when Bromley was working as a bird biologist for the GNWT and they've kept in touch.
"We are fortunate that the North captured Dr. Kreb's interest early on, and that it continues to hold his attention through his ongoing work on lemmings, hares and anything that might be related to their populations and productivity," wrote Bromley in an e-mail to News/North.
"His quest for understanding leaves no stone unturned. Who would have thought that red squirrels are one of the biggest predators of snowshoe hares (they consume the young shortly after birth)?"
Like Krebs, Bromley believes more needs to be done to support biologists in Canada.
"So far, the prime minister has talked a good line but in terms of actually putting things on the ground it hasn't happened where there's been promised research stations and so on," said Bromley. "The focus has been much more on economic development then trying to understand the ecology of the area at this age when big things are happening globally in terms of our climate and our ecosystem, the loss of species and so on."
The bulk of research groups Krebs has encountered in the North aren't funded by the Canadian government.
Instead, the money is usually coming from countries in the European Union, he added.
"Canada is not investing in science, Canada is not investing in its young people and that I find very discouraging."
"(The Weston Foundation) sees that and is trying to do its little bit."
