Transcript

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT – RESURVEYING CALIFORNIA’S WILDLIFE

Watch the video online at http://www.kqed.org/education/educators/clue-into-climate/distribution-organisms.jsp Video length: 7 minutes, 42 seconds

NARRATOR: Dig deep into the collection stored at the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate and you're bound to be surprised. Monica Albe oversees the preparation of the animal skins and skeletons that make up the museum's collection of more than 600,000 specimens. As a preparatory, Albe must make sure that the specimens are as uniform as possible to make them useful to researchers.

MONICA ALBE: We want the specimens to last for over 100 years -- for as long as they can. And if they're prepared in our exact way, then they will -- they'll last for that long.

NARRATOR: Preparing specimens that last forever has been a goal of the museum since its creation in 1908. The project began with an endowment to UC Berkeley from C&H Sugar heiress, Annie Alexander, herself an accomplished naturalist. She proposed as the museum's first director then 30-year-old ornithologist Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell's childhood made him an interesting candidate.

JIM PATTON: Grinnell spent his early years on a Sioux Indian reservation, and he was kind of the godchild of Red Cloud, the famous Sioux chief. And so he had extremely keen observational powers. And not only did he have keen observational powers, but he had a really [questing] mind.

NARRATOR: When he looked around him, Grinnell also saw that human activity posed an immediate threat to California's wildlife.

JIM PATTON: Cities were expanding and agriculture was expanding, primarily in the Central Valley. And so areas that used to be pristine natural habitats were being converted to agriculture.

NARRATOR: What he saw jilted Grinnell and his colleagues into action. They spent the following three decades surveying 700 sites up and down the state. At each location, they took meticulous notes about all the wildlife they saw, and trapped specimens to take back to the museum. 100 years later, these records are poised to become more valuable than ever. Researchers are revisiting 200 of the 700 California sites Grinnell surveyed.

One of the areas being resurveyed is the Yosemite Transect, an 830 square mile rectangle that includes part of and extends to its east and west. Jim Patton, the museum's Emeritus Mammals Curator, is coordinating the resurvey of the Yosemite Transect.

JIM PATTON: The Yosemite Transect is special because it's one of the first that was published as a distinct book called Animal Life in the Yosemite by Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer in 1924. And that book was published and written as much for the lay person as it was for the scholar.

NARRATOR: The book was based on the naturalists' actual field notes, which included detailed maps that allowed Patton's team to retrace Grinnell's steps. The notes also reported on each one of the naturalist's adventures.

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JIM PATTON: July 25th 1915, Sunday. The Lord has sent us a . It was caught by all three of the traps, struggled, and bit the stock of the gun taking a piece with a quick snap.

NARRATOR: In Grinnell's days, the specimens were either shot or killed with traps. Today's researchers kill far fewer animals. They trap most of them with lives traps and bring back clips from their ears, which can later be used for DNA testing. During his first resurvey trip to Yosemite in 2003, Patton began to see many of the same peculiar small mammals that Grinnell's team had found.

JIM PATTON: The pinyon mouse is easily recognized because it has huge ears. I call it Dumbo the elephant. And I picked up my traps that morning, I had one that was closed, opened it up, and I saw these big ears And I go, "Whoa. What is this thing doing here?"

NARRATOR: Patton had found the pinyon mouse at a much higher elevation than Grinnell ever saw it. Patton's team then moved to even higher altitudes in the Sierras in search of animals like the alpine chipmunk and the bushy tailed wood rat.

JIM PATTON: These were animals that were common in the Grinnell period. We couldn't find a bushy tailed wood rat up there on this trip. We could barely find an alpine chipmunk.

NARRATOR: By the end of the resurvey in 2007, he had found that nine species of small mammals were no longer found at their original lower elevations. The alpine chipmunk -- a small, thin tailed chipmunk unique to the Sierra Nevada -- had climbed the most.

JIM PATTON: The animal was common in areas around Tuolumne Meadows in 1915. And Tuolumne Meadows is about 8900 feet. Today, we can't find the alpine chipmunk below elevations of about 9600 feet. So it has retracted upwards apparently by about 1800 feet.

NARRATOR: What had happened to the low elevation alpine chipmunks? A snip from the cheek of the Grinnell era specimens was enough for genetic testing. A comparison of the Grinnell era alpine chipmunk population and today's showed that the low elevation community had died off.

JIM PATTON: They just disappeared. I mean the lower elevation populations disappeared. They didn't move up in elevation, they just disappeared.

NARRATOR: Their demise means that as a whole the alpine chipmunk population is now less diverse. And this has consequences for the species' long term survival.

JIM PATTON: After all, as Darwin taught us, it's the total pool of genetic diversity that's contained within populations that provides those populations the ability to survive over the long run because that's what natural selection operates on. So if you lose genetic diversity, you're losing the buffer -- the genetic buffer a species was utilize in the long run for its -- to survive.

NARRATOR: And the alpine chipmunk is a bellwether for other species.

JIM PATTON: Here is a species that is being impacted by something -- where its range is changing dramatically -- that may affect its long term survivability in the most pristine areas in the Sierra Nevada. And that ought to be telling us something of concern.

2 NARRATOR: Female Voice: Researchers point out that the alpine chipmunk's ascent correlates to the 5.4 degree increase in Yosemite's temperature over the past 100 years. Because of this change, Lyell Glacier has shrunk by half. This warming trend bodes badly for the species that have moved upward.

JIM PATTON: As we project what climate change is going to be over the next 50 to 100 years, we can project how far up the mountains those species are going to continue to retract. And we can project when they're basically going to get pushed off the top of the mountains because there's no skyhook up there to protect them.

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