Jan Rowell, newly appointed research assistant professor, has been fascinated by muskoxen throughout her professional life.
Rowell, who has been a research scientist at UAF’s School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences for nine years, was recently promoted to the professorship. Calling Rowell an accomplished biologist and animal scientist, Professor Milan Shipka, chair of the Department of High Latitude Agriculture, said, “We are very happy she decided to pursue the research faculty position.”
After earning a PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1991, Rowell began studying muskoxen for the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now called the Canadian Museum of Nature), collecting information on muskox behavior. For five months, she observed the animals, at that time considered a threatened species, and recorded everything she saw. “This was an International Biological Program Site visited by scientists from all over the world,” Rowell recalled. “It was an incredible opportunity.”
She worked for Dr. David Gray, author of The Muskoxen of Polar Bear Pass, a study of Canada's High Arctic muskoxen. The book describes the complexity of muskox society and the dramatic events in the annual cycle of their lives. Woven into his scientific work is a fascinating description of the challenges he faced during a winter in the High Arctic studying and photographing these magnificent animals.
Rowell’s master’s degree research was on the reproductive anatomy of muskoxen. She accompanied Inuit hunting trips, but only after she complied with two requests: to wear caribou clothing and to get inside a sleeping bag if she got cold. “I happily agreed,” she said. During the hunt for muskox, which covered hundreds of miles in the dark winter on Ellesmere Island, the hunters slept in igloos, which Rowell found to her liking. “I would take them over a tent any day,” she said. “They are incredibly warm.”
On Banks Island the wild muskox herds began to reproduce and expand. Rowell and other researchers traveled to Banks Island where they captured thirteen muskox calves and flew them to Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Through bottle feeding and halter breaking, the calves became tame enough to converge on their feed when a bell rang. When the muskox reached eighteen months of age, reproductive studies began, the focus of Rowell’s doctoral research. “Their reproductive traits are similar to sheep and goats,” Rowell said. “That gave us a model to use.”
She documented normal endocrine patterns of the estrous cycle and pregnancy, describing unusual progesterone patterns during pregnancy.
Since coming to Alaska, Rowell worked at the UAF Large Animal Research Station, where she continued studying muskox, but also began focusing on caribou and reindeer. She served on a task force investigating health and reproductive problems at the Muskox Farm in Palmer. At LARS, in addition to animal research, she assisted with outreach and education efforts and began researching qiviut, the wool of muskoxen.
Delving into caribou and reindeer gave Rowell something new to ponder—antlers. “I found them absolutely phenomenal,” she said. “They represent true mammalian regeneration from stem cells. This model for regeneration in mammals has been seriously overlooked by the biomedical community.”
Meanwhile, with funding from the USDA National Research Initiative, and in collaboration with Dr. Shipka, Rowell has focused on muskox and reindeer husbandry, including bull behavior, breeding seasons, female estrus synchronization, gestation length, and ultrasonography. “In the future, we will continue to pursue sustainable agriculture in Alaska, with an emphasis on farming indigenous species. The potential of using reindeer antlers as a biomedical model is also something that needs to be explored . The mouse model has been overused,” she said. “Reindeer are a great example of an agricultural species with unique potential for biomedical research.”
Further reading:
• “The Muskox: a new northern farm animal,” (PDF) an overview of muskox research and muskox farms by Deirdre Helfferich. SNRAS Miscellaneous Publication MP 2008-02.
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