Sun and Snow

I decided tonight to take a little time and write this up as opposed to
reading and going to bed like I should. We will see how far I get since I
was up pretty late last night compiling data for some updates to my boss
and for our weekly "sit rep" (situation report).

As of Christmas day, I am the acting camp leader here at the Cape. Our
previous camp leader left on the ship and the next one doesn't come in
until early January, so I get to play the responsible one. It's a little
nerve wracking at times, but it's also a very good experience. Its rare
that they let us lowly contractors be camp leader, so a lot of eyes are on
me and, really, the whole crew. I'm sure we will do fine!

So the weather recently has been… complicated. In one day- ONE DAY- I got
decently sunburnt and had to worry about frostnip (funny name, but it's a
real thing. Its like frostbite lite). Pretty much every day for the past 4
or 5 days has had a mix of beautiful sun, blue sky, light to moderate wind,
and occasional snow flurries that leave visibility at about "I'm pretty
sure I'm walking in the right direction to make it home." On the plus side
of things, the tides have been extremely low around midday for the past
week (thank you full moon that I'm informed is somewhere up there), which
makes getting around easier because instead of sinking up to your knees in
the snow every step you take and then having to slowly walk/ wade through
the snow and slush mixture that you are pretty sure has to get better in a
few steps but actually seems to give into that belief, you can just walk in
the intertidal.

There is nothing more pathetic and disheartening than being on a nice dry
patch of land, seeing your next dry patch maybe 20 feet away, and just
watching your feet and knees disappear as you try to take as few steps as
possible to cover the great crevice-like expanse that in reality is a small
stream melting out under a couple feet of snow.

In other news, we also completed our cape-wide fur seal pup census this
weekend. Being paid to spend all day hiking around looking for baby fur
seals is not the worst job in the world by any means. That being said, it
was a little depressing because our numbers are down significantly from
last year. About 20% down. We did expect about a 10% decrease because
that's just what has been happening to the population for the past decade.
However, doubling that is a bit disheartening. Luckily though, the pups
that are here appear to be bigger overall and growing fast than in the past
2 years, which is a good sign!

Also in good news, at least for now, is that we are only just starting to
get leopard seals trickling in. That's not to say they wont show up in
greater numbers soon, but every extra day the pups get to grow bigger,
faster, and smarter might give them an extra fighting chance. If nothing
else, if the pups are bigger when they are eaten, then maybe the leopards
will only need 3 or 4 to feel full instead of 5 or 6, allowing more pups to
survive! Silver lining?

We ate lots of food for Christmas and are still working on leftovers
tonight (turkey enchiladas!). No big plans for new years really other than
staying up. Now that solstice is behind us the daylight is slipping away!
We are down to only about 20 hours now! And the dusk/dawn that is night
feels just that much darker! In reality it will be a while before we need
flashlights to walk around outside at night, but its fun to pretend like
these are "real world" problems. Despite the snow flurries this is my 4th
consecutive summer with no true winters in between (bouncing between
hemispheres has its perks).

Happy Holidays

Hi all,
I know its been a while and I apologize for that. Things have slowed down a
little here (thankfully), but we still are busy doing a variety of things.
Luckily though, it is Christmas and we will all be helping to make tons of
food (much like Thanksgiving), swapping little gifts, and working only a
half day or two.

We actually have the ship due to arrive on Christmas Day to pick up our
current camp leader and take him back to Punta Arenas, so we are doing our
Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve. Our next camp leader comes in in
early January with the resupply ship (same ship but its on its way out of
the Antarctic now and has to go pick up our fresh food and everything). In
the interim, I will actually be acting camp leader, which is a little
terrifying but also a really great resume builder/ experience for me. I'm
still debating whether to call myself camp leader or expedition leader...
hmm...

In other news the weather had been amazing for a couple days with temps all
the way up into the 40s! It was actually too hot and I was overheating, but
in a good way. Plus there was sun and little wind and playful puppies-
doesn't get much better than that. Unfortunately tonight it decided to
change that. The forecast predicted about 5 mph out of the east. It is
currently blowing 45 with some gusts in the high 50s. So you were close
forecast, but not quite there. We will see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully
it does not impact the boat schedule and Doug is able to get out fine.

Our fresh food is pretty much down to the hardiest of vegetables. We have
lots of canned and frozen goods though so we will persevere. I made a huge
batch of mac n cheese the other night that we ate the following night as
well and still have some left over for lunches. Portion control is not my
speciality.

The fur seal pups are getting bigger and just starting to really become
playful and curious. I think I have the more stubborn defensive beaches
unfortunately where pups are less likely to approach you, but I'm working
on winning them over none-the-less. I've had a few chew on my backpack, my
skipole, my fingers, whatever they can get their little mouths on. I did
unfortunately witness our first leopard seal attack of the season, but so
far we have only really seen 1 or 2 leopards in the area so the pups have
been safe.

Penguin chicks are just starting to hatch out, which will lead to some
hilarity out in the penguin mines. Fuzzy pears with beaks and noodle-like
flippers pretty much speaks for itself.

We still have a lot of ice around the cape in the form of various sized
icebergs. Every once in a while one will get smashed apart by the reefs and
waves and fill a beach or cove with basketball sized blocks of ice. Its
pretty amazing considering last year if we saw just ONE or TWO icebergs we
got excited. It really makes you feel like you are actually in the
Antarctic and that that is NOT normal for most people.

OK thats all for now. I hope everyone has a good holiday and gets to relax
a little. I dont know if anyone is still reading these posts really, but it
is nice to think someone is listening. And Yoshi, thank you for keeping my
mom informed of what I am doing by keeping up with this!

The photo by the way is a female young adult Weddell Seal lounging and
enjoying life on the Cape!

Full Swing

It feels like it's been a while since I updated this. In reality, it's only
been about a week. However, a lot has happened in that week. We've
officially gone from very slow with only occasional action to all action
and pretty much no slow.

As I mentioned last week, we've started perinatal captures, which really
are the heart of the pinniped program for the AMLR program (see links for
what that is if you don't know already). Our mandate is to track trip
durations and dive behavior for 30 female fur seals and to track the growth
and survival of their pups. In recent years, we have upped it to 32 females
because we lose so many pups these days we just could not get enough data
to show anything really.

These 32 captures all take place around the peak of pupping, which often is
around Dec 7-9, but this year we think is later. Apparently South Georgia
island, where a TON of fur seals breed, is also experiencing a delay. It
still means doing all these captures typically over about a 2 week span.
That's 14 days to do 32 captures, which isn't terrible in the grand scheme
of things, but when you start adding in crappy weather days, phocid and
other survey protocols, oh and just general having other things like
cooking and cleaning and showering, it means you stay very busy.

Today (Tuesday) I took my first shower since last Saturday. That's Saturday
November 28… So, officially first shower of December! I got the mixture of
boiling and ice cold water just right this time around too so it was pretty
amazing. I definitely needed it. I've been up until nearly 1am the last few
nights entering and reviewing data, prepping capture gear, and setting up
instruments (time-depth recorders) for fur seals. These days its pretty
much non-stop work from about 9am until at least 11pm, often longer. I
managed to sneak in the shower today because everyone just tried to get
moving early and worked extra fast throughout the day.

I did get to do some laundry yesterday, but really that just meant quickly
washing my long underwear tops and bottoms (we use a bucket with hot water
and a plunger type deal), rinsing them, wringing them out with our fancy
old-school clothes wringer, dumping all the left over water back in the
original bucket (now mostly a light brown color), then throwing most of my
dirty socks into said bucket and letting them soak all afternoon. I say
most because I had to make sure I would have a few dry socks to wear over
the next couple days. I'm not sure if the socks actually got "cleaned" at
all or if I just redistributed the dirt and grime, but I threw some
peppermint scented body wash in there with them and now they smell lightly
of peppermint, so I am pretty pleased about that. I will probably do a more
thorough cleaning once perinatals end. We will still be plenty busy, but it
wont be quite the same organized chaos.

And just to give you an idea of why its so busy, I'll explain the day a
little more. Everyday after breakfast we (the pinniped team) go out and do
our resights just to see who is on the beaches and who has pups. This is
part of our season-long monitoring, but also helps us decide who to capture
on any given day. After resights its usually a quick lunch and then
prepping for the captures. This year one of my goals has been to reorganize
some of the gear, particularly to make it easier for the penguin biologists
who help us by working up the pup while we work on the female (they don't
exactly suffer or complain when we ask them to spend 10 minutes working on
the pup followed by 20 minutes of playing with it and letting it nap in
their laps…). We have also been trying to assimilate more capture
information and behavior data on the females before and after we catch them
to get a better idea of how they react to gas anesthesia and just the
experience overall. This means that once we figure out who we want to go
after, there is a bit of a scramble to look up past data on those animals
and just see what we are working with. It also helps us decide who should
get the time-depth recorders or not.

When the gear has been organized and past data collected, I repack up all
the capture gear, mix bleach for marking pups, heat water for epoxy, load
up my backpack with about 60 lbs of gear and nets, and head to the site.
Once we reach the site, we scout out the target females, determine our best
line of approach, distribute jobs (there is usually one netter, one person
on the pup, and 2-3 people controlling surrounding bull fur seals to make
sure the other 2 don't get bitten), and set up the gear in the best
location available. Recently most of the beaches have been more knee-high
slush than anything, so "best" location becomes a bit relative. Capture
then commence, often with us having to relocate in between. That includes
not only moving my gear, but also moving bamboo bull poles, oxygen tanks,
slings for weighing animals, and a 50+ lbs wood box that we use to let the
females recover from anesthesia in peace.

So if that alone isn't exhausting enough, you then get to haul all the gear
home (at least leaving the boxes and poles at the beach), unpack it all,
clean it up, and set it out to dry because its inevitably going to be wet.
Oh and then you get to also restock everything you just used, which
includes pulling out more sample collecting vials, swabs, bags,
transmitters, etc. You also have to draw up more drugs, prep the next day's
instruments, oh and you now also have a pile of samples from the current
day that need to be processed and put away. Plus there's then all this data
that must be entered into various spreadsheets and the database along with
your other daily data like resights and censuses, which we do everyday on
pups and females to help determine the peak of pupping. Its not just me
doing this work of course, the other pinniped tech helps enormously, but
even then it's a lot of work. Of course every few days one of us also has
to cook dinner and do the dishes for everyone, so that just adds to the
whole process.

Overall, despite the craziness, these captures are pretty amazing. Not only
do we get tons of useful data, we also just get to be hands on and up close
with the animals. When you run your hands through fur seal fur, you
understand immediately why they were hunted so heavily. It also is a time
to test your knowledge and ability to read the animals on the beach. I've
gotten pretty good at predicting how each animal will act, but occasionally
one will surprise you. Its not always good to have a bull suddenly come
charging at you over the helplessly waved bamboo pole to try to steal the
female you are currently moving in a net, but it happens occasionally. The
second you take things for granted or get complacent, something happens to
remind you that these are wild animals. Big, wild animals with minds and
agendas of their own. If nothing else, you get to play find the asshole
bull on the beach. There's always at least one who likes to just cause
trouble.

First Fur Seal Captures

First off, since I cant remember if I wrote anything about it when it first
came out, here are some links to a video about weighing fur seal pups that
we do down here (I think all 3 links lead to the same video). There may
also be some leopard seal related videos from here around these sites as
well. I haven't seen the video, but no I am unfortunately not actually in
it (despite what my own mother thought).

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmvorNG1WIs

Blog with embedded video:
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/12/fur-seal-pups-
ferociously-cute-worth-protecting/

National Geographic video page:
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/missions/expedition-raw/151112
-sciex-exraw-seal-pups

K now that thats done... We have our first Antarctic fur seal perinatal
capture set for tomorrow morning, which will have already happened by the
time this is posted. Perinatal captures take place during the peak of
breeding when moms and pups are closely bonded on the beaches. These
captures allow us to track mom's comings and goings and correlate that to
how her individual pup is doing. We place a small transmitter on her so we
can know the exact time she leaves the beach and how long she is gone for.
Then, by comparing that time gone with how much weight the pup gains, we
can estimate essentially if it's a "good" year or a "bad" year.

Generally speaking good vs. bad years tend to relate to krill populations-
krill being small shrimp-like creatures that make up a huge amount of
biomass around the poles and are the main food source for just about
everything around here from whales to seals to birds. The year type is a
combination of krill location (how far away are they), krill abundance (how
many are there and how densely packed are they), and krill size (even if
there are lots of krill, if they are tiny it can't provide as much food…
obviously).

Unlike in California where marine mammals often suffer greatly during El
Niño years (get ready for even more sea lion strandings unfortunately), the
fur seals down here actually tend to do better in those years. Early
reports coming in are already suggesting that there are more krill in this
area than past years and that they are much bigger than usual. All that
could spell good news for the local seals.

Typically during a good year, moms may only have to leave their pups for 2
-5 days. During bad years that can be stretched to 6-9 days with some
females even leaving for close to 2 weeks! When that happens the pup is
nearly starving every time mom returns and it greatly restricts the pups
ability to really grow, especially since a huge amount of its energy
resources just go to staying warm. That being said, this does happen and
even those pups can and do make it- these animals are amazingly hardy.

In other news, I helped put up our second small wind turbine today. We are
mostly putting it up to test the system and just for fun. At the end of
last season we installed a whole new set of high power solar panels along
with a new set of lithium ion batteries the size of car batteries. We also
already had one wind turbine installed. All these features combined to
giving us an amazing amount of power. So needless to say, the second wind
turbine is maybe a little overkill, but it does help ensure we do not go
wanting for power.

For anyone wondering, we also do have a small generator we can run for
extra power. We use this to power certain appliances like a freezer (which
only actually needs to be turned on once every few days), a microwave, and
personal computer batteries. Nearly everything else is run from the battery
bank either through DC power or an inverter that converts it to 110V AC
power. While our set of electronics is maybe well reduced compared to your
house, we still get away with lights, charging computers, boot driers for
everyone, a small projector (new this year!), and the ability to grind
coffee.

Also, through the combination of a few mostly snowless days and even a
little rain, we have lost a fair amount of snow on the Cape. This is all
happening much earlier than last year, but the past three years have
actually had more snow than usual so who really knows what is going on.
There are still more icebergs than I can count parked between the shoreline
and the horizon, so that's still pretty exciting. Makes me feel like I'm
really in Antarctica!

To leave on a happy/ funny note I will just say that we are starting to get
more and more fur seal puppies and its pretty awesome. For as badass as
these little guys are- being able to survive below freezing temperatures
with windchills and snow that can drop to around -20C (-4F)- they are
basically fluff balls with noodles attached. Big, flat noodles, but noodles
nonetheless. And for their first week or two they might as well have
noodles attached because it takes a ton of effort for them to get all four
moving in the same direction, with hilarious results. Small dips in the ice
become glacial crevices that might require rope and tiny climbing harnesses
to traverse. Getting from point A to point B also requires face plants
every 2-3 steps. Its adorable, especially when they are trying to act
tough. They will growl at you or a (350+ lbs) bull then try to run away to
hide nuzzled next to mom. This would be fine if they didn't always seem to
turn to run then faceplant in the snow. It doesn't help their cause of
being taken seriously. Of course, we are still talking about basically a 12
lbs ball of fluff with big eyes and a few flat noodles attached to it
trying to be taken seriously. Not happening puppies, sorry.

Sorry for low resolution photos, but its new to even be able to send
anything out.