From our community:
Most people have no idea what musk oxen are, as it is often overshadowed by polar bears, walrus, seals, reindeer and caribou and other iconic species of the Arctic. The musk ox, however, has evaded and survived ancient overhunting and it is the largest Arctic land mammal today (polar bears are classified as a marine species). It roamed the tundra and hillsides with wooly mammoths and somehow only they survived against all the odds.
The species is not related to cattle despite it’s name. It is actually related to sheep and mountain goats. So it does not prefer the open plains in their range, but rather hillsides and steep cliffs. It survives because their nuzzle can shove the deep snow out of the way so that the herbivore can feast on the exposed grasses below the snowpack.
The National Geographic reports:
Berger and his team spent February and March for several years studying muskoxen on the icy plains of Siberia and northern Alaska because "we know less about these species than many other large mammals." While polar bears and caribou have been tracked for years, most muskoxen work is done from the sky, as scientists use aerial surveys to count animals.
To understand how extreme weather may be hitting these massive creatures, the scientists, like their subjects, huddled in the dark through good weather and bad, taking photographs and notes. They tracked animal sizes and weather events and used computer models.
They knew that in 2003, one massive rain-on-snow event led 20,000 muskoxen to starve. But they found there also were consequences to frequent smaller events. When pregnant animals were exposed to such periods, they struggled to find food, and their offspring were born with smaller heads. That actually is a big thing.
"Whether we think about malnourished children or elk, we know that during gestation, especially during the last trimester, if a mother can't get access to food, the baby pays the price," Berger says. Muskoxen "come out runtier," which, like other mammals, can lead to shorter lifespans and poor health.
The longterm consequences are unlikely to be good. And increasing warmth is also increasing rain through Arctic winters and springs.
The ‘Ice Tsunami’ That Buried a Whole Herd of Weird Arctic Mammals
And while the ice tsunami wasn’t as obviously triggered by climate change, it was certainly unusual. Storm surges so early in the year, with so much sea ice already on the Arctic Ocean, are little documented in the literature. And Freddie Goodhope, a local Inupiat leader who works with Berger’s team, said that neither he, nor his parents, nor his grandparents ever remembered or described a frozen surge like the one that occurred in Alaska.
Recently a herd of musk oxen were entombed by an ice tsunami discussed in a new paper, published Thursday in Scientific Reports. “During the storm, the musk oxen descended closer to the coast as water receded. But as the frigid tide quickly rose, they were trapped. The water soon rose above the heads of the animals, as wind and surge whipped enormous pans of sea ice ashore. (Later, Johnson would discover chunks of sea ice—five feet wide, eight inches thick—driven more than half a mile inland by the storm.) The musk oxen had no chance”.
She (Marci Johnson) returned home to Kotzebue, Alaska, where she lived and worked as a biologist with the U.S. National Park Service. Winter wore on. A blizzard roared in off the Arctic Ocean, bringing whiteout conditions and winds between 60 and 100 miles per hour. What had been most unusual, though, was the storm surge—she remembers meteorologists warning local residents not to tie up their dogs close to the beach.
A few weeks later, she flew out again to check in on the musk oxen. But when she and the pilot flew over the same lagoon, they didn’t see the amiable shaggy dots—they didn’t see anything.
“We looked down out of the plane, and all there was was white,” she told me. “It was just ice. There was normally a group of 50-plus black dots.” At the same time, the radio-collar detector began emitting a series of fast, angry beeps—a sign that the collar had either fallen off or that the animal had not moved in days. The mortality signal, as it’s called. Johnson asked the pilot to descend.
“We got a little closer and realized there were little tufts of hair sticking out or a horn sticking out. We were looking at 52 on the ground that had been trapped in the ice,” she said.