Every spring, Unalaska prepares to do battle with the national bird.

Eagles become territorial when they nest, and that sometimes leads to attacks on unsuspecting pedestrians.

This year, the city tried to preempt the bird blitz by destroying the nest of a particularly combative pair, but as KUCB’s Stephanie Joyce reports, the eagles weren’t so easily thwarted.

Little Sitkin Volcano/AVO

The Alaska Volcano Observatory is joining the list of agencies that have announced cutbacks in response to the massive federal spending cuts known as sequestration. AVO will stop maintaining its seismic networks on some remote volcanoes.

Late last year, scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory picked up a swarm of small earthquakes at Little Sitkin volcano, in the far western Aleutians. They would have been undetectable to humans, but were picked up by AVO’s seismic network on the volcano, and alerted scientists to the possibility of an eruption. While the closest community is 200 miles to the east and wouldn’t have been affected, an eruption could have caused problems for international flight traffic.

Red lines indicate the fastest possible routes for light icebreakers, blue lines show the fastest possible routes for open water vessels. Images courtesy of Laurence Smith.

Arctic shipping could be possible for unescorted, open-water vessels by mid-century. 

"This research quantifies for the first time the speculations that have been buzzing around for a number of years now," says Laurence Smith, a geographer with the University of California, Los Angeles.

Smith and a fellow geographer modeled Arctic shipping routes using climate change models, and navigation rules. The results show that by 2040, light icebreakers will be able to go pretty much anywhere in the Arctic Ocean during the late-summer melt season, including straight over the North Pole.

Red Tree Coral/Courtesy of Alaska Fisheries Science Center

A petition for the federal government to list several dozen species of Alaska cold water corals as endangered has stalled after an initial review.

Biologist Kiersten Lippmann submitted the petition on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity. She says the corals need better protections because they are often the only structures on the ocean floor.

“They’re kind of like trees would be in a terrestrial environment, in that they provide that sheltered habit and a place to rest and feed from for a whole host of species.”

Wikipedia/Xtylee

In isolated spots in the Bering Sea, there are fields of so-called ‘mermaids’ purses.’ Any beachcomber would recognize them -- small rectangular pods with pointy corners. They’re the protective casing that surrounds the fertilized eggs of skates, and in some underwater nurseries there are hundreds of thousands of them.

Skates have healthy population levels in the Bering Sea, but their unusual breeding habits could make them susceptible to human disruption. That’s why at this week’s North Pacific Fishery Management Council in Portland, the body decided to designate six of the nurseries in the Eastern Bering Sea as ‘Habitat Areas of Particular Concern.’  

After a few quiet months, Cleveland Volcano is waking up.

Cleveland’s last recorded eruption was in November. Then, at the end of January, the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s satellites picked up warming temperatures on Cleveland’s surface. And they found a new lava dome growing in the summit crater. It’s 330 feet in diameter -- just shy of a football field.

Chris Waythomas is a geologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the United States Geological Survey. He says Cleveland periodically grows lava domes, only to have them explode a few months later.

Casey Buie (L) and Mikel Saunders (R) building the eagle-thwarting cone of wire

Eagle attacks are a relatively common occurrence in Unalaska in springtime, but this year, residents will have less to fear.

Last week, a city contractor dismantled two bald eagle nests, including one that was the source of multiple attacks in recent years.

KUCB's Stephanie Joyce reports.

M. Boylan / Creative Commons

The National Marine Mammal Laboratory travels to the Pribilofs every two years to count new Northern fur seal pups. Since 1998, the overall production of pups has dropped by 45 percent. But according to the latest count, just out this month, the Pribilof fur seals bucked the downward trend for the first time in 15 years.

Rod Towell, a statistician from the mammal lab, says pup production increased a tiny amount in 2012 -- just 0.5 percent. While it’s not statistically significant, Towell says that the data is promising.

Aboard the F/V Alaska Knight, one of two vessels that surveyed in the Chukchi Sea last summer/Credit: Stephanie Joyce

Fishing is off-limits in the Arctic, but last summer, a pair of commercial trawlers traveled north to the Chukchi Sea. They were on a scientific mission, to conduct the first-ever comprehensive study of the Chukchi’s ecosystem.

Franz Mueter is the lead scientist on the study, and he's attending the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage this week to present some of the results. He says his team came back with heaps of samples.