From Middle Earth to the End

For one of our very scientific field reports we had to count seals. It was very taxing on all of us brainy students. Well maybe not that hard. First off, there are a lot of precautions that need to be taken with the wildlife in Antarctica. Luckily, we had a marine biologist, Shannon, as a tutor and she explained all the seal behaviors very well.  It was necessary to stay very quite, use small groups and move slowly. If they started barking and acting up, showing teeth, that was our queue to crouch down and crawl away. If they raised an eye to you and then closed it, you were hardly worth their attention (which was good).  Our tutors also had to apply for special permits that allowed us to go within 5 meters of the seals as opposed to the usual 10 meters. It was stressed to us how his limitation was not a goal to reach. If the seals exhibited stressful behavior we may not be able to get within 20 meters of them. This happened quite a few times with defensive males and moms with pups. 

 

 

 

 

Our main goal was to do more than count seals so we took some notes. We were armed with binoculars, notebooks, pencils, and a partner. A page of my notebook would have looked like this, except much messier.

•         Name:       Sarah and Phil
•     Date:     December 21, 2008
•         Time:       11:45 am
•         Weather:  Cloudy 
•        Tag Color:   Yellow
•         Tag Number:     1234
•            Sex:  female    
•     Color:   gray, dabbled lighter gray belly
•         Scars:    none
•         Association:   with pup
•         Behavior:  sleeping
•         Other notes:  raised head at us but went back to sleep

 

We were out looking for Weddell seals when an unusual specimen came about.  I asked Shannon if the small white seal we were about to approach was a pup. She said, yes at first, then changed her mind saying it was too big to be a pup and was a yearling. Then she finally fumbled with the word Crabeater seal (which DOES NOT actually eat crab).  She could hardly believe her eyes as this was such a rare occurrence. They are the most abundant seal in Antarctica but usually found on the peninsula. She speculated that this young male was cruising about and wandered over to the Ross ice shelf. He must have been at the age where he was weaned off his mother but had not reached sexual maturity therefore didn’t waste his energy fighting over territory for female seals. It was the highlight of the trip of Shannon and we all fed off her energy. It was interesting noticing the differences in size, color and face shape of the Crabeater seal vs the Weddell seal.

 

For the seal to the right the behaviors might have read….very very still, lots of scaring, ribs exposed, general health a worry.  The 5 meter rule did not apply in this case since there were no other animals around.  Sad to see but the circle of life is always in effect.

 

 

 

 

 

It may have seen like a hastle, but our safety depended on the drilling. The photo above shows a very safe depth.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was such an awesome experience seeing the behavior of the seals. Not to mention the Transantarctic Mountains made a postcard background. Afterwards we compiled our data. Shannon located the tagging numbers or the seals we saw and we were able to find out their age, birthplace and possibly other details about them.  Our data will be contributed to monitoring the seals in McMurdo sound. Not bad for a physics student I might say.  It was so easy to get caught up in the task at hand but whenever I could I’d take a second to myself and survey my souroundings. It could only last for a second though because there was work to be done and if I thought about the fact that I was doing real science in Antarctica I wouldn’t have been able to contain myself and the shouting and jumping would have scared off all the seals.