• DOI:10.1038/543S54a
• Corpus ID: 4448339

Climate change: As the ice melts

@article{Dolgin2017ClimateCA,
  title={Climate change: As the ice melts},
  author={Elie S. Dolgin},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2017},
  volume={543},
  pages={S54-S55}
}

• E. Dolgin
• Published 29 March 2017
• Biology
• Nature

E mily Jenkins doesn't typically get stage fright. But as she stepped up to the podium in February 2016 to speak to Inuit hunters, elders and fellow researchers at the first ever Beluga Summit in the remote Canadian town of Inuvik, she was a bundle of nerves. " I was terrified, " recalls Jenkins, a veterinary parasitologist at the University of Sas-katchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. " I had these very confusing results, " she says — and she was worried about how the community would react. Two years earlier, a pair of scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, had announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that they had found the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in hunter-harvested beluga whales (Delphinapterus leu-cas) from the region. This tiny protozoan doesn't usually make people sick, but it can cause toxoplasmosis, which poses serious dangers to unborn babies and to individuals with weakened immune systems (see page S52). And although the parasite's infectious stage is usually killed off at freezing temperatures, climate change was helping T. gondii to survive in places that were previously too cold. Instead of just being transmitted by domestic cats through their faeces, T. gondii seemed to be infecting new hosts, including marine mammals — and the UBC scientists warned that people living in the western Canadian Arctic should stop consuming uncooked whale meat. The message didn't go over well in Inuvik, where beluga is a staple of the Inuit diet. It was especially jarring because the locals only learned of the finding through the media, which posted stories with headlines such as " Belugas with 'kitty-litter disease' threaten Inuit, " and " Deadly cat parasite attacks beluga whales, humans may be next. " The researchers, one of whom had been systematically screening and studying belugas from the region with the help of the Inuit for more than a decade, weren't invited back. The courtesy, however, was extended to Jenkins, who, with her baby son in tow, travelled more than 2,000 kilometres in winter to share her latest findings. Unlike the UBC team, which had looked for antibodies in the whales that would indicate a previous immune response to T. gondii, Jenkins and her colleagues had used a genetic test that could detect evidence of T. gondii itself in the brain and heart tissue of 16 hunter-harvested whales. As …