Canadian Ecology

From a crinkle in the Laurentian Mountains of eastern Quebec, which Princeton's Henry Van Dyke once described as "Nature with her teeth bare and her lips scarred," 30 naturalists last week returned by steamer to their homes in Canada and the U. S. They had spent a fortnight at a Canadian Biological Conference discussing and attempting to phrase the natural laws which govern the alternating plenitude and scarcity of wild life in Canada.

The conference took place at Matameck Factory, Copley Amory's manor on Moisie Bay, near the Labrador boundary. A rich Boston merchant who has canoed and snowshoed over a great part of north central Canada, Copley Amory, 65, rebuilt a ruined Hudson's Bay trading post as a refuge from hayfever and a base for fishing. The few Indians and whites in the neighborhood have found in him their patron in sickness and want. Serious want comes to the Canadian backwoods families about every ten years. The game upon which they depend for food and profit runs through ten-year cycles of alternate scarcity and plenty. It was to help many Canadians besides his neighbors that Mr. Amory played host to the conference.

Ducks are scarce this year, chiefly because drought has dried up their breeding grounds (see p. 26). But there may be more subtle causes.

Grouse too are scarce. Chief grouse student at the conference was Professor Alfred Otto Gross, Bowdoin biologist. Some 30 insects infest grouse; study of the conditions which favor these parasites may reveal a cycle upon which to base conservation laws. Cornell University has done much good grouse study.

Half of Labrador's dogs have died from what Eskimos call "Molly coddy." The disease is a brain fever which the dogs catch from foxes. Some years the Eskimos will have to be more careful of their dogs than others.

This year comparatively few rabbits are dying of tularemia (rabbit fever). By 1935 great numbers will die, figures Professor Robert Gladding Green, University of Minnesota bacteriologist. The disease wanes with the number of ticks which carry the virus. This year each infected rabbit carried an average of 400 ticks. In tularemia years each rabbit averages 10,000 ticks.

Drought, storms, insects, germs fluctuate from year to year. The biologists sought some common cause for the variations. The ten-year cycle is too regular to be accidental.

The sun, source of most of earth's energy, develops spots about every eleven years. The sunspots change the amount and nature of the light, heat and more subtle electromagnetic waves which reach the earth. Most of the biologists at Copley Amory's conference were inclined to blame the changing sun for Canada's animal, bird and fish troubles. Professor William Rowan of the University of Alberta wants 1,000 crows this autumn to prove conclusively his thesis that migrating birds fly south in winter less to get more heat and food, than to get more light and exercise. Supporting Professor Rowan in his belief that ultraviolet solar rays powerfully govern the wild animal world were Professor Ellsworth Huntington, Yale geographer and Dr. Ralph E. DeLury, Dominion research astronomer. Broadest hint of sunlight's ecologic effect was deduced by Dr. Harold Elmer Anthony, curator of mammals for the American Museum of Natural History: in equatorial South America, where jungles shade the ground from the sun, there are few animals compared to the teeming open grass lands of equatorial Africa.

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