Teachers' Domain; Polar Sciences Collection; Studying Antarctic Seals; Ipy 2007

I'm just Mannus I'm the field crew leader on what else he'll project be 0 0 9 and wear out our field camp at the razorback. These are for fish heads that we live in. To sleep it's in the equipment and the kitchen. We've got solar panels on the roof of the kitchen and that's where we get all over power. We have two phones and we also have wireless internet or standing on top of the sea ice. Those are basically on top of the ocean and we board this and this is big Razorback colony as one of our biggest seal colonies. We've been tagging. All of the new pups born study area for the past 40 years. And with that we can track reproductive histories of mine to see how many pups they have had and how often they have them and also if their dogs come back and have the whole reproductive history of a lot of these females we tag this pup a few days ago. So it's three or four days old. And right now it's basically feeding every day trying to get big and fat. These pups are we. And they're about 35 to 40 days old. By that time they

probably gained about 200 pounds. And also in that time period the mom will teach them to swim. This. Is. Basically weighing the pups we have a duffel bag and we put the pups in and spring scale and we lift the pop off the ground. With the Springs to get their way. They can be as small as around 50 pounds and they can be as big as 80 pounds. And then we also weigh the pot when they're weaned. Weaning that has a big impact on survival because these pups have a post weaning fast. So basically they're on the ice by themselves for a few weeks before they go out to the open ocean. They have no way of feeding. They don't eat anything during that time. So they're big when the moms leave then they'll have a better chance of surviving that. We also weigh some of the moms some moms weigh 100 pounds. So some

moms only way £700. We use a way in part for that used to weigh cattle. And we coax them onto the weighing platform. And that's how we weigh the moms. We also have a system where we take pictures and we can estimate the mass with the pictures and that's the least the race of wades away moms about starving mom and pop are. Yes. So that's what I'm looking at why there's a big variation between pups when they're born and between moms and we think it may have to do with environmental conditions. We're also looking at maternal characteristics. Her mast her age her experience to see if any of that correlates with. Mass when they're born. This research project is one of the longest running projects ever done along with a mammal with long term data like that we can look at different life

history patterns and different trends in the populations and try to figure out why the population could be dropping or increasing. Yes.