A typical day in the field for our seal research team starts at Big Razorback camp where our team of six trickles into the kitchen hut around 7am to make tasty breakfasts of english muffins, yogurt, fake bacon, and sometimes fresh fruit or frozen eggs. After breakfast we might hear penguins and run outside to see a group of them passing through. They are very curious about our fuel cans and snowmobiles!
Just past 8am we head out to the gear hut where our cold weather clothes hang to dry amidst the tools. Backpacks get filled with seal identification tags, pup weigh bags, scales, and photo bars for photogrammetry of moms (scroll down for more photogram info!). These get loaded onto the snowmobiles where you will also find probe poles for poking the ice to make sure it's safe as we walk, extra road flags, and emergency survival bags.
Jesse and Shane getting ready to weigh pups at Big Razorback colony. Shane is preparing the photogrammetry bars on the right and Jesse is grabbing the tagging backpack. The bars on the ground are used by two people to weigh pups using our shoulders and a scale attached to the hooks!
Jesse and Alissa heading out into the storm to find snow covered puppies!
A snow covered, flipper-biting pup!
After each pup has been weighed we enter the data into our notebooks and field computers. Pups get weighed three times during the season: at birth, 20 days of age, and 35 days of age. Most of our pups weighed between 50 - 70lbs as a day old pup and are now weighing up to 230lbs as we get into the 20 & 35 day weights!
When we weigh a pup we are also curious how much mom weighs throughout the season compared to her pup. You might be wondering how the heck we weigh a 1000 lb animal! That's where photogrammetry comes in. We walk through the seal colony looking at each seal's tag to find the mom we want to weigh. Six photogrammetry bars are placed evenly around mom and photos are taken from 8 angles (head, shoulder, side, hip, flippers, other hip, other side, other shoulder) and at each angle three photos are taken from three new angles (above, eye-level, and ground level).
It is very important that the seal doesn't shift it's weight around or move significantly - otherwise you have to start the photos all over again!
Jesse doing a photo project on a mom at Big Razorback
These photos are then analyzed back in Montana to determine the mass of mom.
Shane and Jesse eat a Thanksgiving Day lunch of hot ramen and mochas after surveying seals all morning.
Two pups hanging out with a mother Weddell at the Turk's Head Colony.
A pup playing hide and seek in the ice.
Pup lounging in the snow. Big Razorback camp can be seen in the background.
Shane and Katie unloading gear from the snowmobiles as a storm blows in.
Everything must be unloaded and rinsed at the end of each day. Since we work on the sea ice everything will get bogged down with salt if we don't clean then nightly.
View from the front door after a storm blows in.
Each day is finished with a delicious home-cooked dinner in the kitchen hut. In addition to these shelves of canned foods we have coolers frozen outside with meat and veggies!
Pup snoozes with his flipper covering mom's face.
All photos obtained with NMFS Photo Permit 21158