By Irene Galea
The caribou has been with us for millennia, and survived the ice age. 'Now, it’s having a hard time surviving the human age'
A wild caribou roams the tundra near The Meadowbank Gold Mine located in the Nunavut Territory of Canada on Wednesday, March 25, 2009.
Caribou in the Arctic are “having a hard time surviving the human age,” with a new report revealing numbers have dropped by fifty per cent in the last two decades.
According to the 2018 Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, numbers are down from 4.7 million to around 2.1 million. Some herds have shrunk by 90 per cent. The report was announced at a press conference at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
These findings are disturbing, says Candace Batycki, conservation program director at Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, an organization that protects Canada’s northern habitats.
“This tells me that caribou are at the front lines of environmental change. They’re canaries in the coalmines,” said Batycki. “Twenty years is not a long period of time for an animal that has been with us for millennia, for an animal that survived the ice age. Now, it’s having a hard time surviving the human age.”...
The Arctic has and is taking substantial environmental abuse because it is not near neighborhoods of people, except, the Native Tribes. The fact of the matter is there is exploitation of natural resources such as oil, gas, forests and minerals for that exact same reason.
It is the impact by humans with roads and the side effects of mining and oil drilling on the air and water that is also causing habitat loss. If the caribou or moose are drinking contaminated water, that is never reported until the size of the herds diminish and the bodies are found in the aftermath.
December 11, 2018
By Brian Resnick
Reindeer are perhaps best recognized by their magnificent antlers, the largest of any deer species in proportion to their bodies. They’re also notable for their epic thousand-mile journeys every year in search of food, in herds of 100,000 or more.
And they’re supremely important to the Arctic ecosystem as a source of food and livelihood for local people, and because of their power to reshape vegetation by grazing.
But the populations of reindeer, a.k.a. caribou, near the North Pole have been declining dramatically in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, the size of reindeer and caribou herds has declined by 56 percent.
That’s a drop from an estimated 4.7 million animals to 2.1 million, a loss of 2.6 million.
“Five herds,” out of 22 monitored “in the Alaska-Canada region, have declined more than 90 percent and show no sign of recovery,” according to the latest Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, out Tuesday. “Some herds have all-time record low populations since reliable record keeping began.”...
