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Sled Dogs as Sentinel Species for Monitoring Arctic Ecosystem Health

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Pets as Sentinels, Forecasters and Promoters of Human Health

Abstract

Here we review sled dogs as a sentinel monitoring species of ecosystem health across the Arctic focusing on environmental changes including pollution, climate change, and infectious diseases. Studies on environmental contaminants have been carried out mostly in Alaska and Greenland. While the majority of reports focus on mercury exposure and health effects, a major classical case-controlled study of exposure and effects from persistent organic pollutants (POPs) has been carried out on Greenland sled dog bitches and their pups. Altogether, the studies show that mercury and POPs affect multiple health endpoints across physiological systems, including reproductive, endocrine, and immune systems, that ultimately affect systems such as the liver and kidney. Therefore, sled dogs have proved to be a good model for assessing the health effects from contaminant exposure of top predators and Northerners in the Arctic. Furthermore, they are widely distributed across the Arctic and show similar correlations to important health indicators reported in Northerners and polar bears. With respect to climate change and disease dynamics of zoonosis, most studies have taken place in Canada. However, at present sled dogs are not utilized in monitoring studies of zoonotic diseases. Such an inclusion will increase the understanding of environmental changes, pollution, and diseases dynamics in Northerners and wildlife. We therefore recommend that ecosystem health assessments in the Arctic including that of Northerners start to include analyses of sled dogs combined with modeling tools. Doing so in a circumpolar perspective will further increase our understanding and monitoring possibilities of ecosystem health and Northerners exposure to contaminants, diseases, and climate change in the Arctic.

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Acknowledgments

Nordic Council of Ministers (NMR NORDEN) is acknowledged for financial support to the project entitled Infectious Zoonotic Diseases Transmissible from Harvested Wildlife to Humans in the European Arctic (ZORRO). We also acknowledge BONUS BALTHEALTH that has received funding from BONUS (Art. 185), funded jointly by the EU, Innovation Fund Denmark (Grants 6180-00001B and 6180-00002B), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant FKZ 03F0767A), Academy of Finland (Grant 311966), and Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Bioscience, Arctic Research Centre (ARC), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Christian Sonne, Bjørn M. Jenssen, Jean-Pierre Desforges, Igor Eulaers, Emilie Andersen-Ranberg, Kim Gustavson & Rune Dietz

  2. Ecotoxicology and Wildlife Health Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, National Wildlife Research Centre, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    Robert J. Letcher

  3. Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Bjørn M. Jenssen

  4. Department of Arctic Technology, The University Centre in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway

    Bjørn M. Jenssen

  5. Department of Environmental Science, Arctic Research Centre (ARC), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Rosanna Bossi

  6. Toxicology Laboratory, Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Bjarne Styrishave

  7. Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding

  8. Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding

  9. The Qimmeq project, University of Greenland, Nuuk, Greenland

    Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding

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  1. Christian Sonne
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  7. Kim Gustavson
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  10. Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding
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  11. Rune Dietz
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Correspondence to Christian Sonne .

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  1. Department of Biology, University of Évora, Évora, Portugal

    M. Ramiro Pastorinho

  2. CICECO – Aveiro Institute of Materials, Department of Chemistry, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Ana Catarina A. Sousa

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Sonne, C. et al. (2020). Sled Dogs as Sentinel Species for Monitoring Arctic Ecosystem Health. In: Pastorinho, M., Sousa, A. (eds) Pets as Sentinels, Forecasters and Promoters of Human Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30734-9_2

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