Dall Mountain Sheep

Today students learned how to interpret and graph a life table as well as make inferences about a population in a 15 year study. Learning about the Dall Sheep population was the first part of the lab on population ecology, in the second part of the lab students will gather data from a local cemetery to compare life expectancy in modern and historical populations.

The Dall Sheep we learned about in class today were studied on Mt. McKinely (also known as Denali). This summer while hiking in the Healy Range (across from Denali) we ran into several groups of Dall Sheep where we had set up camp. Click on the pictures to below to make them larger and you will be able to get a better look at the sheep.


Katie is in the lower left corner making dinner while the sheep had finally moved on from where we wanted to set up camp.A second group of sheep easily moved along higher on the ridge.