Hanging out with chinstrap

11/7

One of the members of the seal team that I had gone out with before was sick, and in order for them to have a chance to collect their data today, they needed someone with experience to go out with them. They came to me asking if I could go. Linnah and Carolyn said no problem. So I got to go out to turtle island again with them to help with their metabolic studies. They’ve moved from the 1wk old pups to 3wk old pups. They were super thankful that I was able to go b/c the pups have now gotten quite big and heavy, and they needed some muscle. They also needed some muscle to help set up the tripod, which they now use, with a pulley system, to live the pup into the metabolic chamber. And since now they’re looking at metabolic rate in water, they were happy to have me help to start the drill and drill the hole through the 4 feet of sea ice to get to the water. The pup we worked on this time was named Chinstrap, and it was an ornery, misbehaving one, so we had to do a lot of seal wrangling. Now that they are bigger, we sedated him for the various physiological measurements and to attach an accelerometer (similar to what is on a fitbit) to measure the amount of shivering (remember this group is studying how pups stay warm). It was another touching mother-son reunion when we dragged Chinstrap back to his mother.

It was a beautiful weather day out on the sea ice with now wind, so that was great, but it’s hard to beat hanging out with cute and cuddly seal pups. They’ll be molting soon and losing their cute and fluffy fur, so it was awesome to get to hang out with them again and it felt good to be wanted and chosen to help out

I sat in the front of the Piston Bully on the way out with Linnea, she is one of the Co-Pi's on the project along with Heather. The other members of the team are Lars (professor), Emma (grad student), and Sophie (Vet)

Linnea has an interesting story. She grew up in Evergreen, CO and went to CSU in Fort Collins. She did her PhD at the University of Alaska studying seals several years down here in Antarctica. She was unable to find a job for several years so she was one of the information rangers at one of Alaska's glacier national parks for a couple of years. She then got a job as a wildlife tech and finally got a post-doc (which she is doing now) at Cal Poly. But she hopes to eventually move back to Alaska with a wildlife job as her boyfriend has a phd and works for Alaska fish and game.

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