科学美国人60秒:Arctic Researcher Bears Up for Science

“So I just don’t approach, at least initially, a group of musk oxen.”

Joel Berger, with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Colorado State University.

“What I do is to take into account other factors that might reflect their responses. And so what I need to know is something about the group size, whether or not males are in the group. I need to know something about snow depth, about snow penetration or how hard the snow is. And then I’ll approach and try to understand whether they stay, whether they flee, whether they charge.”

Oh, one more important point. When Berger approaches the musk oxen, on Russia’s Wrangel Island north of the Arctic Circle, he’s dressed up like a polar bear.

“I know the media has a good time when we dress up as animal models. Of course they do. But remember, two Nobel laureates, Conrad Lorentz and Niko Tinbergen, led the way for getting inside the minds of animals…and they’ve done this through innovative models.”

Polar bears prefer seals for their meals. But the loss of sea ice is forcing them onto the land to hunt for prey that’s usually not on their menu. The idea here is to gauge the response of musk oxen to this formerly rare threat.

“It’s really tough to get inside the mind of a musk ox and especially to understand from mere anecdotes how they may respond in this emerging dynamic.”

Berger works with Russian researchers on their side of the Bering Strait and with Americans in Alaska.

“We’re currently in the process of evaluating more than 100 simulated interactions, some that include our three years of work in Alaska, as well as over on the Russian side…the last time I did something like this was about 15 years ago, to understand how moose and other species would respond to the new threat of wolves in and around the Yellowstone system.”

Back then, Berger and his wife would get into a moose outfit to be able to get close to the ungulates. I wrote about that effort in 1997. You can find it by googling my name and Joel Berger—a man who’s work really suits him. (That joke was unbearable.)

—Steve Mirsky