Trav's Travels: Dream Day!

10/24

I had a most magical day today. One of the seal groups (from Cal Poly) that I have gotten to know since Winfly requested my assistance for a seal procedure b/c they are short a person on their team due to budget cuts. So I had a most amazing day with them out on the sea ice.

We took a piston bully (snow cat) out to Turtle island where a bunch of mom seals are resting with their pups. The pups are 1 week old right now and super cute. Seal pups are so adorable b/c they have huge eyes, huge flippers for their body size, and are fluffy as they haven't gone in the water yet. This group is looking at metabolics of pups and how they deal with the cold of the air and the water since as pups they don't have much blubber. They are also trying to figure out when their bodies are physically ready to be able to survive the cold of the water (though the water is often warmer than the air, the specific heat of water is such that water draws heat away from a body faster than air..thus why we get cold in a 80F pool but sweat in 80F air).

So they are taking various anatomical measurements, collecting physiological samples (like muscle tissues) as well as putting them in a metabolic chamber.

The ride out in the piston bully had beautiful views back towards McMurdo, Erebus volcano, and the Royal Society mountain range). When we got to their hut on the ice out by turtle island, we first walked amongst the large group of seals and their pups looking to see the condition of the previous pups they'd worked on, and to find the pup we would work up that day. All the pups at this time are about 1 week old.

When it was time to get that seal, we all walked up to the pup and it's mother. B/c there are no predators here and no one has ever hunted seals here, they are super calm. You can walk right up to them. It's so unreal to me to be able to walk right up to a baby animal and have the mother hardly care. She'll look at you, and that's it. Then plop back down to sleep. So we walked up to the pup, grabbed it, and put it into a little bag, then onto a sled so that I could pull it in the sled to the hut where the metabolic chamber was. We left 2 members of the team to hang out with the mom, just to make sure she didn't get too stressed but more importantly to keep her from going to a crack or whole to swim away. It's impossible to reunite pup with mom if the mother can't be found.

Several times as we were dragging the pup to the chamber, it managed to escape from the bag, so we had to wrestle it back in. When we got to the chamber, we took the pup out of the bag and put it into the chamber. The chamber measures the amount of oxygen that the pup uses which can be used as a proxy for metabolic rate. We kept the pup in for 40 minutes while we watched it through little windows in the chamber. The vet watches for behavioral changes and to make sure the pup is doing fine. They want the pump relaxed, but not sleeping. This pup kept wanting to sleep, so we had to keep tapping on the chamber to wake it up. Eventually, towards the end it started to vocalize and cry out a bit as it got hungry.

After it was in the chamber, we weighed it (47 kilos = 103.4 lbs). Then we made lots of different anatomical measurements. We took a blood sample, then put some lidocaine on it's back flipper so that we could numb it to punch a couple of holes in it and attach a little sensor that will be used to measure how fast and deep it dives. During all the measurements, the pup is very squirmy, so we basically had to pin it down wrestling style. Or in other words we were hugging a cute baby seal pup! for nearly an hour while all the measurements and procedures were happening. Every zoologists dream!

When we were done with the work-up, we put the seal back in the back, and I again hauled the sled out to where the mother was. Of course the pup squirmed out of the bag several times, so we had to wrestle that 100 pound baby back into the bag and sled several times.

We then dropped the pup off with mom. It was a very sweet and touching moment. They kissed for a few seconds as they re-united and recognized each other, and then the mom led the pup to a farther distance form us. We sat to watch them for 45 minutes to make sure the re-uniting was successful. If it wasn't and the mother abandoned the pup, then we'd keep trying the re-uniting until the mom recognized the pup and took it back. For this reason, the group didn't pick any first time mothers, but instead picked mothers who had successfully birthed and reared a few pups to minimize this risk.

I found out later that the pup's name was King. They are doing an outreach thing as part of their grant where they are talking to school children, and so they decided to name the pups after penguin species in the Antarctic to also help teach them about penguins, so the pups will have names like King, Emperror, Macaroni, Chinstrip, Little Blue, and Adelie.

Well, it was a most amazing day and really made me wish I could be out doing the wildlife biology instead of managing the lab. It was definitely a dream come true as every aspiring wildlife biologi1sts dreams of working with and handling cute, cuddly species, especially the babies. I feel very lucky.

You can read more about the project and look at many, many cute seal pictures here

https://icyseals.com/