12. Resilience and Reorganization: Archaeology and Historical Ecology of California Channel Island Marine Mammals

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Xénia Keighley ◽  
Morten Tange Olsen ◽  
Peter Jordan

AbstractThe hunting of marine mammals as a source of subsistence, trade, and commercial revenue has formed an important part of human cultures across the North Atlantic. One important prey species has been the Atlantic walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus), sought after for meat, skin, blubber, ivory, and bone. Unfortunately, biological studies of current walrus populations and studies across the humanities and social sciences into past use and hunting of walruses, have been poorly integrated. Disciplinary boundaries have left a gap in understanding the reciprocal effects of human-walrus interactions. Emerging interdisciplinary methods offer new opportunities to write the historical ecology of Atlantic walruses. The integration of methods such as ancient DNA, isotopes, past population modelling, zooarchaeological assemblages, and ethnographic interviews can now be used to answer previously intractable questions. For example, how has walrus hunting shaped and been influenced by changes in human settlement and trade, what have been the cumulative impacts on walrus populations, the extent of anthropogenic selective pressures or the effect of changing hunting regimes on particular populations of walruses? New, collaborative research approaches applied to the wealth of Arctic archaeological faunal remains already housed in museum collections offer a unique chance to explore the past dynamics of human-animal interactions.


1981 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Colinvaux

AbstractA 14-m core of lake sediments from St. Paul Island yields a long environmental history of the south coast of the Bering land bridge. Tritium assay demonstrates that sands in the bottom 8 m of deposit are injected with modern water, suggesting that a radiocarbon anomaly is the result of modern carbon introduced in groundwater. The remaining radiocarbon chronology, coupled with a time-stratigraphic pollen-zone boundary suggests that the record penetrates to the mid-Wisconsin interstadial. Pollen percentage data, Picea pollen influx, and pollen species lists allow reconstruction of the land bridge vegetation, which was tundra, without shrubs or trees, with bare ground, and comparable to Bering land bridge tundras found further north. There was no coastal mild or wet strip. Plant associations comparable to those of the modern Aleutians or Pribilofs probably did not exist along the land bridge coast and the region was probably not suitable for breeding by fur seals and other marine mammals. A cold, dry, continental air-mass system reached to the coast itself. The south land bridge coast did not offer an environment to aboriginal human populations that was significantly milder than that of the land bridge plains to the north. At about 11,000 yr B.P. the Wisconsin dry climate was replaced by a regimen comparable to that at the modern tree line of the interior, and this climate in turn was replaced with the modern system at about 9500 yr B.P. Climatic change was independent of fluctuating sea level.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Danilo Malara ◽  
Pietro Battaglia ◽  
Pierpaolo Consoli ◽  
Erika Arcadi ◽  
Simonepietro Canese ◽  
...  

The Strait of Messina is located at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea and is considered a biodiversity hotspot and an obligatory seasonal passage for different pelagic species such as sharks, marine mammals, and billfishes. For the first time, in the Strait of Messina, our research group tagged a Mediterranean spearfish (Tetrapturus belone) using a pop-up satellite archival tag (PSAT). The observation of abiotic parameters (depth, light, and temperature) recorded by the PSAT confirmed that the tagged specimen was predated after about nine hours. The tag was then regurgitated 14 days after the tag deployment date. The analysis of collected data seems to indicate that the predator may be an ectothermic shark, most likely the bluntnose sixgill shark (Hexanchus griseus).


2020 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 161-174
Author(s):  
R Palmer ◽  
GTA Fleming ◽  
S Glaeser ◽  
T Semmler ◽  
A Flamm ◽  
...  

During 1992 and 1993, a bacterial disease occurred in a seawater Atlantic salmon Salmo salar farm, causing serious mortalities. The causative agent was subsequently named as Oceanivirga salmonicida, a member of the Leptotrichiaceae. Searches of 16S rRNA gene sequence databases have shown sequence similarities between O. salmonicida and uncultured bacterial clones from the digestive tracts of marine mammals. In the current study, oral samples were taken from stranded dolphins (common dolphin Delphinus delphis, striped dolphin Stenella coeruleoalba) and healthy harbour seals Phoca vitulina. A bacterium with growth characteristics consistent with O. salmonicida was isolated from a common dolphin. The isolate was confirmed as O. salmonicida, by comparisons to the type strain, using 16S rRNA gene, gyrB, groEL, and recA sequence analyses, average nucleotide identity analysis, and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. Metagenomic analysis indicated that the genus Oceanivirga represented a significant component of the oral bacterial microbiomes of the dolphins and seals. However, sequences consistent with O. salmonicida were only found in the dolphin samples. Analyses of marine mammal microbiome studies in the NCBI databases showed sequences consistent with O. salmonicida from the common dolphin, striped dolphin, bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus, humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae, and harbour seal. Sequences from marine environmental studies in the NCBI databases showed no sequences consistent with O. salmonicida. The findings suggest that several species of marine mammals are natural hosts of O. salmonicida.


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