MAMMOTH ARCTIC PATHS (MAP): Interdisciplinary Research into the Movement Ecology and Biogeography of an Iconic Arctic Animal through Environmental Change.

Information about how Arctic ecosystems in the past responded to changes, like past periods of warming, is exceedingly valuable because it can reveal the results from a series of natural experiments completed over thousands of years. When the Arctic warmed after the last ice age, many large animals in the Arctic, like the woolly mammoths, went extinct.

However, little is known about how mammoths lived and moved in the Arctic. Researchers want to know how mammoths moved around and if their movement changed depending on the environment. Did they have certain areas they always went to, or certain paths they followed in the Arctic?

Luckily, much can be learned from the teeth and tusks of mammoths. These animal parts can hold records of chemicals (called isotopes) that can tell us about a mammoth’s life. In this project, the investigators will study the chemistry of the tusks and teeth from mammoths in Alaska.

By looking at changes in the chemical makeup over their lifetime, researchers can determine where mammoths moved during the peak of the last ice age and right before they went extinct in mainland Alaska. The investigators are working with collaborators at the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN). The radiocarbon dating of the mammoths as part of this project will also be used in an education program called the “Adopt a Mammoth,” project, which is a partnership with UAMN and is aimed at students in kindergarten to twelfth grade.

The investigators will work with an artist who specializes in drawing ancient animals to create visual representations based on the findings. These will be displayed in the UAMN to share the project’s discoveries with the public.

Substantial climate warming and environmental changes in the Arctic are resulting in significant alterations in the biogeography and movement patterns of animals, including polar bears, caribou, and beaver. In some cases, these changes are proving to be exceedingly stressful, pushing some animals to their eco-physiological limits and the possibility of extinction.

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an iconic and extinct Arctic species, reputedly served as important ecosystem engineers. Sometime after the end of the last ice age, when climate warmed and environmental conditions changed, they went extinct from the Arctic landmass known as Beringia, along with several other large animals. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed for the cause of these relatively recent extinctions from the Arctic biome, and these have been heavily debated.

Despite this research attention, it is not yet clear to what degree mammoths were able to mitigate fluctuating environmental conditions through movement to more preferable habitats and/or persist in certain habitats over the long-term. The overarching project goal is to determine whether woolly mammoths from Arctic Alaska consistently moved between a series of frequently used areas and adopted similar movement patterns and routes during the last glacial maximum (LGM) compared to after the LGM as the climate warmed.

The investigators will analyze a suite of isotope ratios of elements, including strontium and oxygen, preserved in radiocarbon dated mammoth teeth and tusks. Variations in the isotope signatures will be compared with isotopic maps of Alaska to create spatial models of the lifetime movements of mammoths during and after the LGM.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.