Santa's Reindeer Feel the Heat as Numbers Shrink Worldwide

SAN FRANCISCO – Santa Claus better stock up on reindeer, because he may have trouble scrounging up replacements in the not-too-distant future, new research suggests.

Reindeer populations in northern Russia are falling, according to a new study. The new findings dovetail with other research showing that reindeer populations are falling in other parts of the Arctic as well.

But Santa's trusty steeds aren't the only iconic wintry beasts facing worldwide declines. Polar bear populations could decline by about one-third over the next 30 or 40 years based on sea ice estimates, another study found.

And hotter, drier conditions in the western U.S. could mean steep reductions in mountain lion and mule deer populations.

Worldwide changes

For a while now, scientists have documented many changes in the Arctic that suggest trouble is brewing.

"The reindeer population in the world, and caribou, are declining pretty rapidly," study co-author Andrey Petrov, a geographer at the University of Northern Iowa, said here today (Dec. 12) at a news briefing at the annual American Geophysical Union Meeting. "We don't know why it's happening."

To get a better understanding of why, Petrov looked at reindeer populations in the Taimyr Peninsula in Far North Russia. The Taimyr reindeer population, at 600,000 animals, makes up 24 percent of the global reindeer population. The population peaked in 2000 at more than 1 million creatures, after the dismantling of the Soviet management system led to dramatic reductions in hunting. However, since then the population has been falling.

Petrov used satellite views of the region's vegetation, along with the vegetation and the corresponding presence of reindeer. The herds of reindeer are clearly visible in land satellite imagery, which allowed Petrov to map reindeer movement across the Arctic during the winter, their spring calving season and summer. He found that, overall, the reindeer have a strong tendency to return to the same places over and over again.

But there were some changes. Warming conditions meant that mosquitoes flourished at lower latitudes, so reindeer were venturing farther north during the summer season, possibly to avoid mosquito harassment, Petrov said. That meant they had a longer migration from their southern winter grounds.

Climate change also had other impacts, especially on the vulnerable young calves.

"Rivers that are historically frozen solid were melting earlier in the season," Petrov said at the briefing. "They have to swim across open rivers. That's one of the reasons we believe the population is declining."

Another study, presented Dec. 12 at the British Ecological Society meeting in Liverpool, England, found that adult reindeer living on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located between Norway and the Arctic, are shrinking in size, likely due to climate change. 

Polar bear plunge

Polar bear numbers will also likely fall in the next several decades, said Kristin Laidre, a principle scientist at the Polar Science Center at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle. Laidre and her colleagues used satellite imagery to map sea ice in different regions of the Arctic over time.

Past studies have looked at individual populations, and in many areas, data is poor, with just a few years of population data rather than annual trends, making it hard to create a global prediction of polar bear trends. However, because polar bears require sea ice for hunting, declines in sea ice extent can be a strong predictor of animal population declines in the future, Laidre said.

Her team found that sea ice declines around the world lead to about a 70 percent chance that the polar bear population will drop from 26,000 bears to about 17,400 over the next 35 to 40 years.

Shrinking wild spaces

Changes in the climate will also affect the western desert area of the U.S., said David Stoner, a researcher with the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University.

Stoner used satellite imagery to map the vegetation changes from 2000 to 2014 in the western United States. He found that during the drought of 2002, the abundance of available vegetation that mule deer eat contracted to the mountainous regions, and less of the Mojave Desert and other dry regions had enough greenery to sustain the population.

At the same time, the actual abundance of mule deer dropped by about 20 percent, with the deer occupying a smaller area. Even though mountain lions don't eat grass (mule deer make up about 60 percent of their diet), the declines in vegetation also led to a dramatic drop in mountain lion populations as well, Stoner said.

"We were very surprised that the vegetation indices were very good predictors of mountain lion abundance as well, even though they exhibit only an indirect relationship with vegetation," Stoner said.

Paradoxically, the dwindling mountain lion population may mean more conflicts with humans. As fewer mule deer survive in the wild, they may venture out into the manicured greenery of human landscapes.

"Agriculture and urban landscapes are irrigated and fairly consistent. As conditions in native habitat diminish, it makes those human landscapes all the more attractive and appealing," Stoner said.

Mountain lions, meanwhile, may have to roam farther to find food, which also increases the risk of clashes with humans, he added.

New Test Could Improve Diagnosis of Rare, Fatal Brain Disorder

A rare and fatal brain disorder called sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease can be challenging to identify, with patients needing to undergo a number of tests before a diagnosis can be made. But a new test could improve the accuracy of the diagnosis, according to a new study from Italy.

In the study involving dozens of patients, the test, known as RT-QuIC testing, was 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), as well as 100 percent accurate at excluding patients who didn't have the disease, when the researchers followed a two-step process of testing.

"Our results suggest that the application of RT-QuIC testing will improve the accuracy and speed of sporadic CJD diagnosis," compared with current methods of testing, the researchers, from the University of Verona, wrote in the Dec. 12 issue of the journal JAMA Neurology

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a progressive brain disorder that affects about 1 in 1 million people each year worldwide, according to the National Institutes of Health. In the early stages of the disease, people can have memory and vision problems, and a lack of coordination, followed by involuntary movements, blindness and coma. People typically die within a year of showing symptoms, the NIH says.

The disease is caused by proteins in the brain called prions. These proteins fold abnormally, and lead to lesions in the brain.

There are three forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: one that is inherited, one that can be caught from exposure to infected tissue from the brain or nervous system (sometimes referred to as "mad cow disease"), and one type that is "sporadic" and does not appear to have a genetic or environmental cause.

The sporadic type is the most common, responsible for 85 percent of cases, according to the NIH.

Usually, people who have sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are diagnosed by a number of physical exams and laboratory tests. These tests can include a test of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF, the fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord) that looks for certain proteins called 14-3-3 and tau proteins, which are associated with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

But RT-QuIC, which stands for "real-time quaking-induced conversion," lets researchers test directly for the abnormal prions that cause the disease.

The test requires a sample of CSF or a sample of cells collected from inside a patient's nose using a swab, or both.

Then, the samples are tested for prions. Because patients may have only a small amount of abnormal prions in their brains, the RT-QuIC method amplifies prions so they can be detected. (It accelerates the process by which the prions replicate, until they are present in quantities large enough to be detected.)

In the study, the researchers used the test on 61 patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and 71 patients who didn't have the disease. (Because the only way to confirm Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is to test brain tissue after death, patients were followed until death, or until they received an alternative diagnosis.)

All 61 patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease tested positive for the condition based on the samples of CSF or nasal cells, or both.

The test was not perfectly accurate when only samples of CSF were used, or only nasal cells. But the researchers found that when they used a two-step process (using CSF testing first, followed by nasal cell testing in some cases), the test was 100 percent accurate. They were able to correctly diagnose all of the patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and correctly exclude all of the patients who had a different condition.

That's an improvement over current diagnostic methods — a 2009 study found that the current methods correctly diagnose about 83 percent of people who actually have sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and correctly exclude 71 percent of people who don't have the disease. [Top 10 Mysterious Diseases]

There is no treatment for CJD. But getting a fast test result could benefit patients who don't have the disease — in the study, some of the patients who were thought to possibly have CJD tested negative, and then were treated successfully for the conditions they actually had, the researchers said.

The RT-QuIC testing method used in the new study "should soon become the standard laboratory examination for the diagnosis of sporadic CJD, adding to or replacing current tests for 14-3-3 and tau proteins in CSF," Dr. Paul Brown, a former senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who is now retired, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.

Interestingly, the RT-QuIC test did not perform as well on patients who had an inherited form of CJD; of the eight patients in the study with genetic forms of the disease, only half had a positive test result.

The reason for this finding is not clear, and it's too soon to draw conclusions, given the small number of patients in the study with genetic forms of the disease, Brown said. However, it could be that the sporadic form and genetic forms are truly different in terms of the timing and distribution of the abnormal proteins in the CSF and nasal cells, Brown said.

The researchers noted that the genetic forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease generally would be identified using results of genetic testing for mutations in the prion protein.

Finally, because the study included only patients who already had symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it's not clear whether the test could identify patients before they start to show symptoms, the researchers said.

RT-QuIC testing is already available in most Western countries (including some laboratories in the United States), as well as in Japan and Australia, the researchers said. It typically costs about $100 to $200 per test, and the results are available in one day for nasal cell tests and three days for CSF tests, they said.