Search
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
Arctic Explorations at the National Museum
Oldest Arctic Record
To date, the oldest Arctic sample from this project is a hermit crab (Anomura) collected from St. Paul Island in 1868. Part of the Pribilof Islands, St. Paul is nearly 300 miles west of mainland Alaska and the same distance north of the Aleutian Islands. It is not surprising to find items from St. Paul at this precise time, just a year after the US government purchased the Russian interest in Alaska, when businesses and government agencies were rushing north to extract natural resources from the area.
Captain Bartlett and the Effie M. Morrissey
Although the majority of the specimens catalogued for this project are from the waters near Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, the legendary Captain Robert "Bob" Bartlett donated many specimens from his travels around Western Greenland. Bartlett was an adventurer and sea captain who accompanied Robert Peary, the famed Arctic explorer, on several of his attempts to reach the North Pole in the first decade of the 20th century, although Bartlett never made it to the North Pole himself. In high demand as an expert ice navigator, he spent the next 40 years sailing to the Arctic, his harrowing adventures breathlessly described by newspapers of the day. In his own schooner, the Effie M. Morrissey, he traveled to the Arctic over a dozen times between 1926 and 1945, exploring Baffin Bay and the west coast of Greenland in particular.
Bartlett undertook these voyages in the Morrissey with commissions from the major museums in the country to collect marine invertebrates, fishes, and mammals. One NMNH transaction card from 1938 lists 376 specimens donated from his expedition that year, ranging from sponges to anemones to copepods to pycnogonids (sea spiders), along with insects, plants, fish, and the contents of 56 bird stomachs and one narwhal stomach. Bartlett was known for keeping meticulous collecting records and field notes, although deciphering his handwriting is not a straightforward task. Thankfully, his collection labels were completed much more legibly.
Alaska King Crab Investigation
In 1940, Waldo Schmitt, a curator at NMNH specializing in crustaceans, led a US Fish and Wildlife-funded exploration of the Alaskan Pacific to explore the viability of harvesting the red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) for commercial purposes. Americans were already eating red king crab in canned form, caught by foreign vessels just outside Alaskan waters, so this was an attempt to develop the industry for American companies. Setting sail from Seattle in August 1940 in the Tondeleyo and the Dorothy, Schmitt and the crews explored the area from Ikatan Bay to Kodiak Island. While methodically recording red and blue king crab biomass and locations, they managed to bring up and transport home much more than just their primary catch.
Exploration spread to the Bristol Bay area in the years after the initial 1940 voyage, and commercial US fishing began there in 1946. Since Schmitt’s original exploratory trips, more methodical surveys have continued over the years, providing valuable historical records for determining the ongoing health of species populations that are part of the commercial fishing industry. Rapid decline of red king crab populations in the 1980s resulted in cancellation of the fishing season for a few years, and despite some moderate recovery in the decades since, NOAA and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently cancelled the red king crab fishing season in 2021 and 2022. Other crab species, particularly the snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio), are also experiencing dramatic declines in population density.
Deepest Arctic Record
The deepest collection sites from these recently cataloged specimens belong to amphipods collected from Fletcher’s Ice Island in 1966. Also known as T-3, Fletcher’s Ice Island was a floating ice sheet as large as a small city and well over 100 feet thick. The research settlement on T-3, developed first by the Air Force in 1952 and later maintained by the Office of Naval Research up until 1977, was extensive enough to contain its own runway (open only in the icy winter; resupply was by parachute drop in the warmer summers) and an array of buildings supporting oceanological survey efforts. A collaboration between the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow and the University of Southern California collected marine specimens from T-3 and two other drifting ice stations, ARLIS I and II, at various times during this 25-year period.
This particular batch of amphipods was collected in the summer of 1966 at a depth between 3800 and 3850 meters. At this point, T-3 was located at approximately 75º N, 300 miles north of Nuvuk, the northernmost point of the United States and the home of the Point Barrow Arctic Research Laboratory. T-3 drifted another 700 miles further north by 1968, to 85º N, but the ocean basin was shallower there, with benthic specimens collected at a depth of “only” 2000 meters.
The many stories behind the IZ Arctic collection reveal a history of scientific discovery and environmental monitoring. We hope that in the next year or two, nearly 20,000 of these lots will be cataloged, increasing the size of the current Arctic collection by half. By making more Arctic material digitally searchable and accessible for research, this record of historical biodiversity will continue to enhance our understanding of this rapidly changing ocean biome. Funding to curate specimens and digitize records was provided by two Collections Care and Preservation Fund (CCPF) awards.