Museum Receives NOAA Grant for Marine Mammal Archives

Submitted by Kerynn Fisher
Phone: (907) 474-6941
10/23/02

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service has awarded the University of Alaska Museum $100,000 through its Prescott Stranding Grants Program for archiving marine mammal tissues and specimens in the museum’s collections. The grant is for the maximum amount allowed under the program and is one of two awarded in Alaska this year.

"With more than 8,000 marine mammal specimens in our collection, we have a wealth of data about Alaska’s marine mammals," says Sylvia Brunner, Mammal Collection Manager at the UA Museum. "This funding will help us process these specimens and make information about them readily available to researchers and resource managers."

The award provides funding for museum staff to incorporate data on more than 3,000 marine mammal specimens currently in the museum’s collections into its online database, as well as process additional specimens acquired over the next three years through partnerships with subsistence hunters and government agencies. In addition, staff will compile information on each specimen’s use in research projects and citations in scientific publications, cross-referencing with, for example, the Alaska Marine Mammal Tissue Archival Project and the National Institute of Health’s genetic sequence database, GenBank. The museum is currently the only organization with reciprocal links connecting specific GenBank genetic sequences back to the source specimen, a valuable resource for researchers who want to expand on previous studies using the same data specimens.

The museum’s Mammal Collection contains the largest holdings of ribbon seals, spotted seals and walrus outside of Russia, including the specimens used in 1977 to determine that spotted seals and harbor seals are two distinct species. More recently, a wide variety of tissues, mostly from animals taken by subsistence hunters, are being used to ascertain if changes in prey consumption have contributed to declines in Alaska populations of Steller sea lions, northern fur seals and harbor seals. Other specimens have been used in a variety of studies on molecular genetics, environmental pollutants, epidemiology and isotope analysis of predator-prey relationships.

Loans of the museum’s marine mammal specimens have increased dramatically in the past five years, growing from an average of 46 in the early 1990s to 472 in 2001. As information about the specimens more readily available to researchers via the online database and improvements to DNA sequencing technology, for example, museum researchers expect the demand for specimen loans to continue to grow.

While many of the museum’s marine mammal specimens were collected prior to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the holdings continue to grow thanks to partnerships with the Alaska Regional Marine Mammal Stranding Network, Alaska Native Harbor Seal Commission, Alaska Native Sea Otter and Steller Sea Lion Commission, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the University of Alaska/Minerals Management Service Coastal Marine Institute and other federal, state and local government agencies.

The UA Museum is the primary repository for specimens and artifacts collected on state and federal lands in Alaska. Its collections represent millions of years of biological diversity and more than 11,000 years of cultural traditions in the north. With more than 79,000 specimens, the Museum’s Mammal Collection is among the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The Alaska Frozen Tissue Collection, with samples from over 40,000 animals, is the largest tissue collection specializing in northern regions and among the largest such collections worldwide.

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s Prescott Stranding Grants Program provides grants for the recovery or treatment of stranded marine mammals and the collection of data from living or dead stranded marine mammals for scientific research regarding marine mammal health.