T o THE zoologists of the mid-nineteenth century the invertebrate fauna of Alaska was virtually unknown. Some specimens from coastal localities touched on by earlier expeditions had found their way into various European and North American museums, but much of this material remained unidentified and...
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.549.640 http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic7-3%264-266.pdf |
| Summary: | T o THE zoologists of the mid-nineteenth century the invertebrate fauna of Alaska was virtually unknown. Some specimens from coastal localities touched on by earlier expeditions had found their way into various European and North American museums, but much of this material remained unidentified and of all the invertebrate groups only the Coleoptera seem to have received critical study (Mannerheim, 1843, 1846, 1852, 1853). In the interior it was not until 1861 that the first significant collections were made at Fort Yukon by Robert Kennicott, working for the Smithsonian Institution. Kennicott returned in 1865 as chief of explorations on the Western Union Telegraph Company's expedition (James, 1942) but died the following year, and his work was continued by W. H. Dall, who sent back a wide variety of specimens to the Smithsonian Institution. Towards the end of the century two expeditions made important contri-butions to our knowledge of Alaskan invertebrates. The International Polar Year of 1882-3 resulted in collections from Point Barrow (Ray and others, 1885) and the Harriman Alaska expedition of 1899 made the most intensive scientific study undertaken in Alaska by a privately financed expedition. The results of the latter expedition, published in fourteen volumes as the Harriman Alaska Series of the Smithsonian Institution, contain in volumes 8-14 the most important single source of information on the invertebrates of Alaska and the adjoining seas. The Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913 to 1918 also made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the northern and western coastal regions as far south as Nome (reports published at intervals between 1919 and 1925). At much the same time the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey sponsored an intensive study of the biota of the Pribilof Islands (McAtee ed., 1923), and the zoological specimens from the Katmai expeditions of the National Geo- |
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