Some Firsts...

So I had a few firsts for this trip/ my life this last weekend. Not all of
them are "good" per se, but they were bound to happen I suppose.

The first first was I ran for the first time in Antarctica. Unfortunately,
this wasnt a pleasant joyful jog around the neighborhood. In fact, it
wasn't even for the exercise and cardio to keep my body from getting overly
mushy. No, I ran because I was being chased.

Generally when you walk around here, you keep your eye on the bull fur
seals. They are the biggest, they're deceptively quick, and they don't
really take kindly to foreigners encroaching on their ladies. However, the
bulls get it. Other than a few slightly over agressive ones, they are
concerned about their ladies and keeping as many as possible, so if you
walk away, they dont follow. Therefore, the real ones you have to watch out
for are the ladies themselves. I found this out the hardway (although I did
know it from whats now 2 months of life here).

To stop stalling and get to the story, there is one female fur seal in
particular that is something of legend. I have heard multiple stories of
other people encountering her and only escaping by swinging their hightech
self-defense weaponry, aka a ski pole, wildly back and forth and hoping to
land a glancing blow that wont so much hurt her but at least confuse her
just long enough to get away. Think of it like throwing a dud smoke bomb at
your feet, but you still yell "SMOKE BOMB!" and then giggle as you run
away. The problem with these stories I kept hearing is nobody ever bothered
to tell me WHERE they were. Well I can tell you now, she hangs out at Playa
de La Caverna.

This weekend was our cape-wide pup census. It's exactly how it sounds. 3 of
us walk all the beaches on the cape and count every puppy we see. I ended
up counting about 2,113 puppies in total. On La Caverna, I was the second
person to count that beach for the day. The beach only has one entry/exit
point, but is this cool little rocky outcropping with a small, but
surprisingly deep cave behind it. I walked through, counted pups, checked
out the cave, no problem. On my way out, literally at the very edge of the
animals, I stopped to take one last look around for any straggler pups I
might have missed. As I turned, I saw a female coming at me. This isnt
totally uncommon, females will defend pups and often give you something of
a bluff charge, especially once you give them a good poke wiht your
skipole. The problem was, this female did not stop. She ran right over the
pole, biting her way up it. This made me jump to say the least. After
jumping a few feet away, I looked back to see her continuing to come
straight at me. You can tell when a fur seal is pissed because their eyes
get huge and all crazy looking. She had the crazy eyes. It kind of makes
you flashback to highschool when you could only dream of girls just
throwing themselves at you. They tell you about the crazy ones, but you
never believe them... until its too late...

Quickly calculating that my flimsy ski pole was unlikely to provide much
protection in this situation, I did what I only assume is a routine
occurance for the likes of Justin Timberlake, One Direction, and other
similar celebrities- I ran from some crazy chick. Unfortunately, as I
mentioned, the beach only has one way in or out, otherwise its water or
sheer cliff, and that one way out, while close to where I was, was not
exactly smooth sailing. It was more like steep, potentially slippery rocks.
I ran anyway. Fur seals, as awkward looking as they are, are surprisingly
quick on land and I couldnt get any distance between her and me as I tried
to scramble up a rock. So at one point, I turned to do what I could to fend
her off. Reluctant to turn and just start hitting her or kicking her, I
tried to use my skipole to get it between me and her and essentially push
her away/ slightly down the hill from me. The skipole broke in half. Woops.
At that point, if I fell, she would be on top of me bitey end first.

This brings me to my other first, and this one is actually a semi
surprising lifetime first.

Saturday Dec 27 2014 I got bit by a pinniped for the first time. Now
luckily I had a few things going for me. First, I was just about at the
edge of the beach when the skipole broke and was just starting to make some
headway up a snowy embankment. This meant I was likely at the edge of where
she might follow. Second, I was wearing large ski gloves. When push came to
shove at that pivotal breaking point (literally), I went for the push or
shove. I basically used what was left of my pole and my other hand to try
ot push her down. It kind of worked. She got hold of my left hand with her
mouth. To just go ahead and ruin the drama, she only bit the tip of my
middle finger and because of the gloves, didnt even break the skin. She
pulled the glove clean off, which probably gave her a sense of
accomplishment and helped end the chase. It still hurt pretty badly though
and now the end of my finger, including under the fingernail is all black
and blue. It could have been much worse though.

Female fur seals aren't huge. They are about 40-60kg (maybe 90-130lbs).
Really they are more like a medium sized dog though. That being said, even
little dogs can bite pretty hard. I'm glad that my first true bite (not
counting the puppies here that try to chew on my hands on a daily basis)
wasn't a terrible one. Seal finger is a very real bacterial infection you
can get and, while our medical supplies are very well stocked, help is
never closeby. At the same time, I am a little embarassed to say I was run
down and viciously mauled on the tip of the finger by a girl seal.

So morals of the story- always look out for the crazy girl in the crowd and
dont bring a skipole to a bite fight.

White summer christmas

So just a quick update, since I have to go eat dinner in a few minutes...

We had almost a solid week of nice weather. It was the first week with an
average temp above freezing. A lot of the snow has finally started to melt,
though there is still plenty on the ground. To help it out, it has been
snowing all day so we have a nice layer of fresh powder.

This morning the weather was actually kind of nice. It was snowing, but
there was no wind and it was actually almost 40F outside. The snow was that
nice, dry, light fluffy stuff that just makes you want to start a battle by
pelting someone in the back of the head with a well crafted snowball (I've
been reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes at breakfast...).

We also finished our perinatal captures officially the other day, so things
have finally slowed a little. However, we are just starting up our diets
analysis work, which will continue through the rest of the season.
Basically we collect 10 scat (that science for poop) samples each week,
sift through them, figure out what they've been eating, and measure and
analyze it for whatever we need. Often it involves mostly pulling out
carapices (again, science for shell) of krill, which are small shrimp like
creatures that feed pretty much everything in the ocean. They are very
small though, and have already passed through an animals digestive tract.
The common metaphor here is its like trying to find a 1/2 inch piece of
saranwrap that has been rolled up and throw into a pile of crap. You then
have to unroll it to measure it while taking great care not to rip it or
damage it, otherwise you get to start all over. Now do that 20 times per
scat. Basically it ends up taking about and hour to an hour and a half per
scat. Luckily we have 3 people working on them this year, usually its only
2. If you find fish bones, its a whole other level of figuring out the
species and how degraded the bone is (specifically we look for otolith
bones, which are unique to a species and can tell the age of the fish as
well). Its all very cool science once you (literally) sift out the
information.

Our Christmas plans will be similar to Thanksgiving. Smoking some turkeys,
eating lots of food, minimal working, but still working some. We are also
doing a small gift exchange. Unfortunately none of the returning people
remembered to tell us new people this happens so none of us came prepared
with gifts, so we had to get creative. The most common is to give "gift
certificates" for common camp chores, like dishes, slop bucket, etc. My
plan is to have a goody bag with a series of chores and people pick
randomly to see what they get. That way, I dont have to pick favorites and
I dont have to do the same chores over and over. I tried to be creative and
make something, but you (legally) cant take anything from Antarctica so
even if I was awesome and carved a bone I found (original idea), nobody
could take their present home with them. So I'm just being creatively
boring.

Finally, our latest SitRep should be coming out soon if its not out
already (https://swfsc.noaa.gov/contentblock.aspx?
id=13620&ParentMenuId=42). It should feature a photo of yours truely having
just shovelled out a trench halfway through Antarctica to expose our long-
buried path to the shop and generator. We might get to send a photo out for
Christmas, so I will try to post something here, otherwise it will go to my
parents and they can distribute it accordingly (if we even get that
bandwidth increase for a day).

A Break in the Action

Has not happened yet... We are keeping busy, but we are almost done with
our perinatal (basically when females are having pups) captures period. We
have so far caught 41 seals in the last 2 or 3 weeks. By the time this is
posted we will hopefully have caught 2 more to reach our required sample
size for one of our CCAMLAR projects.

First off, CCAMLAR is basically the governing body for Antarctic research
and they require you to submit certain project data to continue working
down here. Or something like that. The main data we submit is trip
durations of females with pups, so 32 of the captured females get VHF (very
high frequency) tags that we can monitor essentially 24 hours a day through
two automated data recorders to see when they are on shore and when they
leave. Basically we have exactly what I WISH I had had for most of my
masters project. This is more how its supposed to be done, rather than me
spending hours in my car driving up and down the coast looking for seals.

Once these captures finish up, things will hopefully calm down a little for
a couple weeks. We still do daily tag resights and other work, but we wont
be catching seals everyday. The resights are getting a little tougher
because pups are getting more adventurous so they have started wandering
all over the place. The moms too, so you have to search a little more to
make sure you get everyone.

That being said, the number of females on the beaches has dropped like
crazy. Females usually stay with their pups for about a week after its
born, then they begin going to sea for often several days at a time to
forage. When they come back, they find their pups on the beach by calling
to each other, then the pup usually nurses until its belly looks like its
about to pop. This is especially true for pups of females that make longer
trips because they are nearly starving before mom comes back, then they
gorge themselves silly. This is usually followed by something of a milk
coma, where you can actually walk right up to them sleeping on their backs
and at most they might give you a half-ass growl. You can even rub their
belly a lot of the time without them having the energy to do anything about
it because they are so full. Its like Thanksgiving day for them ever 2-5
days.

So anyway, many of the moms are now off foraging, leaving just packs of
puppies roaming the beaches. While they still sleep a good amount of the
time, many are also starting to form little gangs that romp around
together. I saw one chasing a skua, which made me very proud.

It is a little weird how attached you get to some of the animals just
because you see them everyday. I only recognize a handful (it helps that
the pups of those ladies with VHF tags get names and symbols bleached on
their butts), but you still get to know them and where they hang out. One
of the tiniest pups I have seen here also happens to be one of the fiercest
and I love it. He doesnt take it from anyone. My marked pups also happen to
be named Arya (we have a game of thrones theme going), Kitty, Bubbles, Pi,
Carmen Sandiego, Rage, Wienerschnitzle, Funkmaster Fred and Aunt Jemima, so
you find yourself saying hi and checking in with them each day. Making sure
that the other pups arent being mean or calling them bleach butt. Actually
Funkmaster Fred is one of the biggest pups out there. I also almost got a
video of Arya chasing Kitty, which as anyone who has recently watched Game
of Thrones might remember, her dancing master tells Arya to catch cats as
practice for swordsmanship...

Speaking of GOT, I'm mad at that show. They finally killed my favorite
character. I know, I know, they kill EVERYONE (spoiler alert...), but
still. I wont say who it is or what season we just finished or whatever,
but fell free to guess. Now I'm a little turned off of watching future
episodes.

In other non-animal news, we also recently watched the Lego movie. I went
into it thinking ok this could be fun, but its a kids movie so who knows,
maybe they will pull something off... I have to say that movie is one of
the best and funniest I have seen this year. I highly recommend it to
anyone, kids or adults (many of the jokes I think are targeted for adults).
Even if you didnt play with Legos and therefore didnt have a childhood, you
will enjoy the movie.

I have also been reading a Bill Bryson book, which I am a big fan of. This
one is I'm a Stranger Here Myself, which is a collection of short newspaper
articles he wrote for a british paper about moving back to America after
20 years in England. I also highly recommend In a Sunburned Country, which
he wrote about travelling through Australia. A lot of the humor I try to
incorporate into these posts comes from his style of writing... I probably
shouldnt be giving those secrets away...

Thats it for now. I am continuing to lure puppies and elephant seal weaners
alike to be my friend and hang out. Maybe once we have a slightly more
flexible schedule I will get to spend some quality time with them, at least
before they become leopard seal poop...

Working Hard and Keeping Busy

So this will actually be short, because I am too exhausted to get overly
sidetracked. When your brain is spent, your train of thought if more like
the little engine who could. Except he doesnt always make it over the
hill...

We are in the heart of our perinatal season. This basically means "the time
when moms have pups." Median pupping occured somewhere around today,
meaning the maximum number of pups being born happened maybe today or
yesterday. One of my beaches has around 150 pups on it alone. The sad thing
is that 10 years ago, there were something like 3 times as many pups on
these beaches. There used to be puppies roaming around the deck of our
cabin all the time, now we will be lucky if any wander by (although this
isnt all bad, I'm told that trying to sleep while a batch of pups have
wrestling matches and races around the building can be a bit difficult).

So the moral of the story is, we have been working hard to retrieve tags
that overwintered here (remember, its summer here now), put out new tags to
monitor behavior over the summer, and just generally keep track of who is
who on the beaches. Its been mostly 8-12 hour days, and those 8 hour ones
were primarily because the weather sucked and was snowing/raining on us.

It has also been slightly warmer recently, which seems awesome at first but
causes 3 main problems: 1) The snow on the ground turns soft and slushy,
meaning each step you take is like russian roulette of am I going to find
firm ground or sink to my knees. In this case though, there are 5 bullets
and one blank, so even when you win, you think you're going to lose and it
ends up being just as hard to walk. 2) Instead of just snowing all the
time, now it sometimes decides to rain, or sleet, or some weird combo of
all 3. Snow is generally relatively dry. Rain is not. Rain is wet, about as
wet as it comes. I'm told that rainy and overcast is more "typical Cape
Shirreff weather." Joy. And 3) I have finally aclimated/ figured out what
clothing to wear to keep myself warm here. Long underwear, work pants,
bibs, fleece sweater, outer shell jacket, hat. And a facemask of some sort.
Now, however, I get overheated. Its amazing what just a couple degrees
difference makes. Actually, I think this really circles back to problem one
more than the actual temperature difference in that walking is so much
slower and more difficult, you work up a sweat.

Today on my walk back from my beaches, normally about a 10 minute hike,
while struggling to pull each foot out of the snow with each step, I
realized that, more than being tired and wanting to get back to the cabin
to sit down, I was just getting bored... I was moving so slow that I would
look around thinking I must be almost there and realize I had barely gone
anywhere. Its amazing how hard you can work to get almost nowhere (like
Grad School... am I right?).

We also saw an adult leopard seal today hanging out on one of my beaches.
They are pretty ridiculous looking when you get up close. Their heads are
almost comically large while their lips get all wrinkly, making them look
like a really old lizard that wants to gum up a piece of lettuce. Except
instead of gum it up, they use their set of large, very sharp teeth. And
instead of lettuce, its a penguin, or baby seal, or adult seal for that
matter... or your face if its in the mood.

Last note before I go to bed. It will be about leopard seals because thats
the last thing we talked about here- Its very interesting (to me at least)
the dynamic of leopard seals in water vs out of the water. In water, they
are a fearsome killer. Just to clarify, I still think they are cool and
they are not mindless killers or anything, but they do kill to eat and they
eat a lot. They are also one of the only marine mammals that I know of that
has been known to intentionally kill a human in the wild. Killer whales
never have (documented at least), so keep that in mind. They have big
powerful jaws and teeth that allow them to take down even adult female or
juvenile fur seals that are not huge, but not tiny either. But when
leopards are on land, there is almost no fear of them by the tasty morsels
walking all around the Cape. Penguins walk right by without hesitation.
Fur seals allow them to share beach space with them. That being said, there
have been increasing numbers of reports here of leopard seals actually
taking pups while on land, but generally its rare. Usually the leopard
waits in the shallows for a naive pup to venture a little too far into the
deep end. So the whole relationship is different. Kevin, the other pinniped
tech here, said he has actually seen a penguin standing on top of a leopard
seal on shore! If a juice cheeseburger found its way onto my belly, I would
probably eat it, or at least take a good stab at it.

My guess is that leopards ("sea leopards" as they are often called in old
timey books, aka early 20th century even) are built for killing in the
water, so even though they could kill many things on land, they dont. Its
much easier to injure and drown your prey than to outright kill it on land
where there are rocks and pointy objects that could scratch your valuables
(like eyes...). So why chase down food that runs away when you can just
camp out and have room service deliver it to you? Thats my guess. Its still
funny to see though.

I know I said this would be short but I just thought of another comical
fact I learned yesterday about penguins (it relates to leopard seals
kinda). They are afraid of water. Makes sense to be weary about the ocean,
they get eaten there, so lining up and waiting for one brave sole to take
the plunge (or get pushed in), and then having everyone dash in at once
makes sense. However, apparently these ultra geniuses of the animal kingdom
will do the same thing with a stream that is maybe 3 feet wide and not more
than 6 inches deep. I haven't observed it first hand yet, but I am told
they will line up at the end of the stream and just wait until a large
group has amassed. Then when someone yells fire, they all run, dive, roll,
try to fly, and use any other means necessary to ford the raging river of
death where a 14' leopard seal obviously must be hiding...

Yet they will jump on top of an ACTUAL leopard seal if its on land.
Freakin' penguins...

Brief Post Turkey Updates

These last two days have been very long with a lot of work, so I am
reasonably exhausted, so I am going to keep this short (actually short, I
feel like I usually tell myself these will be short then they suddenly get
all philosophical or something).

Friday was the first day I actually got to hold a penguin. It was pretty
exciting, kind of a life bucket list check mark there. I will say this
about penguins though- they have evolved to live in some of the harshest
environments possible. By losing their ability to fly they can swim and
dive to depths people can only dream of. Their little legs carry them for
miles across ice and snow and up extremely steep hills to get to their
breeding colonies, where they deliver relatively fresh fish to their young.
But man are they dumb. Evolution has sculpted their bodies to fit their
needs, but it definitely skipped a step moulding whats inside those goofy
little heads. As much as I try to ignore it, the fact remains, they are
still just stupid birds (sorry birders, I'm trying, I really am).

Penguins seem to have about 3 driving forces. Eat, collect rocks for the
nest, and sit on eggs. Notice I dont say produce young or reproduce,
because may of them fail at that little step. There are nests where the
eggs have been laid directly on a sharp rock and cracked. Nests where the
parents sitting on the egg in the snow have melted the snow down to where
the bird can barely see out of its little hole and the eggs are starting to
float away under the snow around it. Sometimes they try to steal each
others eggs, but less as a parental instinct and more because they think
it would look good with the rocks they have adorned their divot in the snow
with. Which comes to another interesting/ funny/ kind of sad behavior of
the penguin. Plenty of people have heard oh the male brings a female a
pebble and if she likes it, they bond, and mate, and raise offspring blah
blah blah. Maybe I just watched Good Luck Chuck too many times (mostly for
Jessica Alba, lets be honest). I dont actually know if thats true, but what
I do know is they incessantly collect rocks to make their nests out of. Its
kind of cute, and it gives truer meaning to the term "penguin mines" that
we call the northern tip of Cape Shirreff where all the penguin colonies
are.

That being said, they arent all stoic birds tirelessly collecting rocks to
protect their young and impress their mates. A good number of birds have
figured out, why walk all the way over there and search for just the right
pebble when I can just sit here and wait for my neighbor to not look and
steal his. It happens almost constantly. The work I was helping with was to
weigh male-female pairs and their first egg laid. This involved removing
birds (very temporarily) from their nests. Usually we tried to only remove
one bird at a time and give them a chance to have the mate there to take
over nest guarding duties, aka sitting on a rock stuffed inside a blue
latex glove that we used as a dummy for their white round egg... However,
despite our best efforts, there was inevitably some times where neither
bird was on its nest. Fittingly, we were doing this work on Black Friday,
because it became a mad dash to raid and loot the empty nest. Sometimes
with up to 4 or 5 birds standing around picking the best rocks (including,
at times, the one in the latex glove). At one point, a male we had just
released back to his nest was standing in his own nest, stealing pebbles,
then looking around trying to find his nest. His instinct to steal rocks
temporarily overpowered his instinct to sit on any egg-ish shaped object IN
HIS NEST. Silly birds. Its also pretty entertaining releasing them after
you are done working them up because they are flailing and slapping and
biting (naturally), but if you hold them above their nest and their egg for
about 10 seconds, they eventually see the egg and instinct kicks in and
they just calm down, waddle over, do their little mate head bobbing dance
(occasionally they do this to the egg even without their mate there), and
sit down. And its not like a oh they gave me back my egg, thank goodness,
everything is ok, I'm going to calm down. No. Its a ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK
ooo look an egg. Or at least some pebbles to steal.

Ok enough about penguins (I knew this wouldn't be quick).

In other news, I also held my first fur seal pup today (saturday). They
continue to be some of the cutest animals I have ever seen or worked with.
They have little bug eyes and kind of raccoony faces, with ultra soft fur,
and flippers they still haven't quite learned how to use yet. When you pick
them up, they often just keep waving those flippers around and look like
they are trying to take off out of your arms. The one I held was the
sweetest one of the day. It was only about a day and a half old. I think it
hadn't quite learned how to bite yet, so it kind of just hung out in our
arms. The first pup we caught today (we worked on 4 mom-pup pairs) was a
bit of a devil and did its tiny growl and tried to bite a lot, but after
about 5 minutes it got tired and fell asleep in McKenzie's arms. Could be
worse. Usually during these captures we get help from the penguin
biologists (McKenzie and Tony), who work on the pup as we work on the mom.
We recovered 4 GLS tags (see earlier posts) and 2 time-depth recorders,
which I am excited to see the data from. The plan is to recover another TDR
tomorrow. So far we have gotten 3 TDRS back and only lost one, which is
pretty good numbers considering they were deployed (epoxied onto the seals'
backs) in March.

Now I really am going to end it. Hopefully everyone had a good
Thanksgiving. I'm sorry I couldnt say it to each of you individually. We
are finally getting some nicer weather (it was 1C/~33F today!). The problem
now is the snow is starting to melt so walking around SUCKS. You sink to
your knees in places and just have to keep going. I did have some fun
skiing and am getting to the point where I can kind of turn going down
hills, so thats good. And just to be clear, we use telemark skis so its
harder than you might think!

K now I'm really done.

I need dinner ideas! Send some recipes, or leave them in the comments below
if you can figure out how to do so.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We are preppring 2 (smallish) turkeys down here to cook in our brand new
smoker. There will also be mashed potatos, green beans with panchetta
(since there was some confusion and we got that instead of bacon), pecan
pie, pumpkin pie, pisco sours (drinks native to peru and chile), and I'm
sure lots more food. Our resident chilean also is making sopapillas
(spelling?). Not sure what they are exactly but I'm sure a few of you
might...

We did our second capture the other day, this time on a female with a pup.
It was pretty exciting and the pup was freakin adorable. It was large, but
still only weighed about 7kg (maybe 16 lbs). Somehow those little guys
withstand subfreezing temperatures with gale force winds. We recovered
whats called a GLS tag. I want to say GLS stands for Global Location Sensor
or something like that. I feel like I have already mentioned
these, but basically, its this tiny tag that is smaller than a die. We can
clip it onto a flipper (for penguins they attach it to their leg) and the
sensor calculates sunrise and sunset each day and uses that to calculate
approximate lat/long of the animal. Even with how small they are, they can
work for over a year. The only tricky part is you have to get them back,
but with animals like fur seals and penguins that come back to the same
area year after year, its not too hard. They are also relatively cheap, so
these tags are awesome tools that provide a ton of data with relative easy
for relatively cheap.

In other news, wednesday finally showed a break in some extremely bad
weather we had been having for a couple days. Monday we actually called an
official storm day because it was consistently blowing over 40 mph with
gusts up to 59 (highest I saw at least). Tuesday wasn't much better, but it
was only in the 30s with gusts to the 40s. 40 is our official "danger"
cutoff, though I will tell you the difference between 39mph and 41mph is
pretty minimal...

Because of the nice weather we had an explosion of female fur seals and
pups showing up. One of my survey beaches went from having about 7 females
to having closer to 15, now with at least 7 pups and there will probably be
more when I go back out today to check on them all. Median pupping is
usually around Dec 7, so we expect to get a lot more in the next couple
weeks. This will keep us very busy catching animals. Oh I also learned how
to milk a female fur seal yesterday! We take a small milk sample to test
for persistant organic pollutants and plastics, as well as to see fat
content and other things. These are very important to see not only the
health of the seal, but to analyze what she is passing on to her pup.

Ok thats it for now, more to follow soon. We have a busy day of cooking and
doing dishes ahead of us here.

Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy the food and family around you, or at least make
the best of wherever you are.

The Puppies Are Coming!

So after our first fur seal pup was born last week (earlier than usual), we
have had a bit of a lull in births. It is actually a good thing probably,
since the weather has been less than pleasant. Tonight (friday night) is
probably the nicest it has been all week at 31F with only 6mph winds and no
snow coming down. It did snow off and on all day, but with less wind (less
being very relative, it was only in the teens and low 20s mph) it is not
too bad to deal with at this point. I have been adjusting to the cold and
can at least run out to pee or get food from the supply hut in just a long
sleeve shirt if needed, though much longer and it does still get pretty
cold...

Anyway, back to the pups. Our first one that was born just over a week ago
we actually though did not make it through the storms. We had not seen it
with its mother in several days, which were during the worst of the
blizzard. HOWEVER, just yesterday Kevin (another one of the pinniped people
here) found the pup, still alive, down the beach a little ways cuddling
with a block of ice. He returned the pup to its mom and they immediately
reunited, calling to each other, and rubbing and what not. We walked by
about an hour later and the little girls belly looked ready to pop it was
so full of milk. She probably had not eaten in several days.

I guess this brings up a little bit of a controversy when you live and work
in a place like this. Most people probably would not question the story I
have just told you, but some might, biologists especially. By returning the
pup to its mom Kevin directly changed the outcome of that animals life.
Typically biologists are supposed to remain at a distance from the things
they study. It can be extremely challenging at times, especially when their
subjects are so damn cute. There are people that would argue we should have
let nature take its course and let the pup die. In many ways they might be
right. Natural selection can be cruel, but it tends to favor those most
suited for the current environment. You could argue that, since this female
gave birth so early, her pup was subjected to the storm that other pups
avoided by being born late. If this pup survives, it may tend to give birth
earlier than other females, thus creating a positive feedback that may or
may not be beneficial to the species. At least that is usually the
arguement people make. Just like how saving a sick animal can weaken a
population as a whole and potentially add diseases to the group that
otherwise would have been weeded out.

That being said, when you are faced with a moral dilemna like that, it is
near impossible to say no, especially in a place like this. I dont
think have talked too much about the fur seals themselves we are studying
here so far. This island was recolonized by fur seals I believe in the 50s
or 60s. Their numbers had been driven way down by humans hunting them for
fur, meat, and over competition for food and whatever else people blame
animals for. They reached a peak abundance here in 2002 and 2003 when the
Cape was crawling with them. However, since then we have seen a decrease of
about 10% each year and it continues to get worse. Leopard seal populations
responded to the increase in fur seals (among several factors probably) and
are the main cause of death of these pups. Each year, the researchers here
will be subject to watching 60-90% of the pups they observe born and raised
die here before they ever go for their first foraging trip. It is the harsh
reality of the natural world and this is a place where fur seals are losing
the battle. It is the reason that penguins march by our camp everyday,
trekking probably over a mile, maybe more, instead of swimming around the
shallow bays and coves to get to their colonies from their hunting grounds.
Around here, leopard seals rule supreme.

So again, I will say I stand behind moving the pup and I would have done it
myself if I were there. We are here to study this group of animals, but I
think we are all hoping it recovers and survives. The pup was not sick or
weak, it got separated from its mother during a heavy storm. It may have
even found its way back eventually as the weather got nicer and calls could
be heard further away. And while I do not want to alter the breeding
behavior of animals here, climate change is in full effect here. Krill
populaitons have moved and gotten smaller (mostly the krill themselves are
smaller), peak pupping time actually has been getting earlier and earlier
for the fur seals. Contrary to most places in the world, Antarctica has
actually been getting colder these last couple years, but it doesnt mean
that the global changes will not directly affect the animals. So maybe its
good to have a few outliers, because if things do change suddenly (sudden
on an evolutionary scale), it is usually these outliers that become the
last hope of a species. If every single salmon returned to the stream it
was born in, or every sea turtle to the beach it hatched on, salmon and
turtles could never colonize new streams and beaches. If you put a damn on
that river or a hotel on the beach, you could wipe out a species. There is
a far greater than not chance that pup will not survive to its first
birthday, I say giving it a little boost early on is not the worst thing in
the world.

On a happier note, the weather seems to be lessening up a little and with
it more females have begun arriving and pupping. I now have 2 pups on my
beaches and was actually informed another was born after I had completed my
surveys. These tiny little things look like kittens with flippers and have
an adorable little trilly purr call back and forth with their mothers.
Pretty soon the beaches will be littered with them and then the real work
for us begins. We may not be saving every single one, but hopefully our
work here informs people on what is happening to their population and
allows managers to make decesions that will one day protect this species
here, and throughout the Antarctic.