Climate change already affects Arctic animals

REYKJAVIK — While the fight for international action to combat warming in the Arctic intensifies, people at “ground zero,” as one Inuvialuit recently noted in Iceland, are already sensing changes in plants, animals, fish and birds.

In the early 1990s, hunters in Sanikiluaq were shocked when eight out of 10 eider ducks, about 100,000 birds, starved and froze to death over the course of a few days during a cold snap.

This devastation could happen again, warn researchers with the Canadian Wildlife Service, because colder weather and heavy ice conditions are projected for the Belcher Islands. These could again drive eiders from freezing shallow banks off-shore into the small open-water of polynyas where there aren’t enough mussels, clams and urchins to keep them alive.

Researchers at last week’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Symposium spoke about the wide range of effects people in the Arctic can expect to witness from now to 2100, unless Arctic warming is curbed. Some impacts are as striking as the mass kill of eider ducks and others are invisible to the eye.

Apart from the effects of warming on temperatures, among those impacts on the Arctic land people won’t be able to see are:

• Levels of ozone, a protective gas in the earth’s atmosphere, will be particularly low in the spring when levels of harmful ultra-violet radiation naturally rise to higher levels. Warming on the ground leads to a cooling of clouds in the upper atmosphere and less ozone. And, despite global efforts to get rid of the fluoro-hydrocarbon chemicals that destroy ozone, ozone levels are expected to remain low for years. Without a thick protective ozone layer, levels of ultra-violet radiation, particularly in the spring, will remain high;

• Increased levels of ultra-violet radiation can cripple tiny micro-organisms that live in lakes in Nunavut’s High Arctic, according to findings from studies on Ellesmere Island. As temperatures rise, there will also be less snow to deflect UV radiation in the spring, and people, plants, fish, wildlife and even construction materials are expected to be affected;

• Levels of methyl mercury, a neuro-toxin that affects the nervous system, naturally rise as water temperatures go up, according to new research. More mercury is also released from coal-burning power-plants in the South, travels north and accumulates in fish — so much so that Dr. David Lean from the University of Ottawa says it’s probably not a good idea to eat lake fish more than twice a month, but rather stick to smaller, younger fish, with lower levels of mercury;

• Parasites will affect more mammals in warmer conditions because the parasites will have better survival rates. The umingmakstrongylus pallikuukensis worms, that live in the lungs of muskoxen and already affect 100 per cent of muskoxen near Kugluktuk, thrive in higher temperatures. More severely affected muskoxen will reproduce less, have a poorer body condition, altered behaviour and shorter lifespan. The presence of even more parasites could “compound the negative effects of severe weather events,” says researcher Susan Kutz. Caribou could also become susceptible to new parasites.

More visible impacts of warming on fish, birds and wildlife will include:

• Arctic char will remain in the lakes instead of migrating to the ocean to feed. Char may initially react to higher temperatures by increasing their numbers, but over the long-term, char may be a less healthy, smaller and tasty fish. Char spawning grounds may eventually diminish; char will be more susceptible to disease and other fish, such as Atlantic salmon, will come into warmer Arctic waters and compete with char;

• Shorebirds like the Red Knot, a kind of sandpiper, and other Arctic shorebirds face a disappearing habitat. More vegetation will disturb their nests, while more extreme weather conditions means birds may abandon their young. As the High Arctic habitat changes, some species of seabirds could be literally pushed into the ocean in their search for cooler habitats and become extinct. More than four out of 10 of the 37 species of seabirds are already declining;

• Walrus may suffer. “It’s not a good time to be a walrus,” said one researcher whose studies in the Bering Sea show higher ocean temperatures and no ice, which means there is less food and cold water than walrus prefer. What is happening now off Alaska is similar to what could eventually occur in the rich feeding area of Nunavut’s Lancaster Sound.