the great seal hunt
excerpt from a letter to Eric, 1994

My friend Suzy moved out here from Boston a few months ago. She's getting a graduate degree in marine biology at UC Santa Cruz, about an hour from here.

I went down to visit Suzy last weekend and we volunteered to go help capture elephant seals on Saturday. Drove out to the beach with all these appealing earthy-crunchy, over-educated, seal-catching types. Caught four and put them in big cages and brought them back to the lab. Two yearlings and two young’uns. Stupid, lethargic, unfriendly beasts they are. Hundreds of them lying around on the beach. You come up and capture one and take it away in a cage and they just sort of look at you. Then you come back and take another. They look at you a little more warily then, but they don’t go so far as trying to run away (i.e. hop/slither back into the water). The yearlings you have to drug. You run up behind them with a hypodermic needle and jab them in the small of the back. They snarl fiercely and try to turn ‘round, but really on land they’re just these big, clumsy, 400 pound sacs of seal-blubber and they have a terrible time moving at all, much less doing 180's. They do bite if you let them, but it’s a danger comparable to getting hit by a glacier. The real danger lies in the way they snort and snarl at you if you get too close. They have this remarkable evolutionary adaptation by which they are able to projectile-sneeze when they snarl. An ugly sight. Great gobs of frothy white stuff that commonly flies several feet from the upset seal. A good reason to keep your distance. But anyway, you drug the yearlings and then you wait a few minutes for it to take effect. The dosage isn’t enough to put them under, just enough to make them woozy. Then you can all run up and throw a bag over it’s head and wrestle it into the cage. It’s important to get the bag securely over the head or else you run the risk of being bitten or snorted upon. So much for the yearlings. The young’uns, “wieners”, are easier. They don’t even have to be drugged. You just get a group of 5 or 6 people to sneak up on one, throw a bag over it’s head and wrestle it into the cage. Fun to watch. Certainly beats professional football.

“But why?”, you ask. Well, they’re doing a few different studies. They’re studying how the seals dive, for one. I think the seals can dive for like 45 minutes at a time without coming up for air, so you can see why someone might be interested in studying that. They developed this device to monitor the seal’s heart rate and another device to record time and depth information. They attach these things to the seal and then let it go. Later they catch the seal again, remove the recorder, and do complicated scientific things with the data. They also have this other device which is almost too weird to mention. They’d like to know where exactly the seal goes when it’s out swimming about. The obvious way to do this is to use this thing called the Global Positioning System which triangulates off of a few satalites and tells you exactly where you are, anywhere around the world. But for some reason they can’t use that now, although they will be able to in a year or two. So for now they have this crazy device that measures all sorts of things from which you can make a reasonable guess about location. One of the crazy things is a light meter. See, you’ve got this time/depth recorder already, so you can tell when the seal surfaces. And then if you can tell how light it is out at different times of the day you can get a pretty good idea of latitude. How about that? They have something equally silly for longitude but I’ve forgotten what it is, or perhaps I never really understood it to begin with. So all of this amounts to a hunk of machinery about the size of a very small loaf of bread. You need to mount all this on the seal’s back, plus mount heart-rate monitors on the chest and back. “And how is this accomplished?”, you might well ask. Well I’ll tell you. Hysol epoxy. The same stuff that holds the little lane marker reflector things on the road in states like California and Florida. Also the stuff that holds the Stanford solar car together. So you whomp a heaping mugfull of epoxy on the seal’s back, smear it around, plop the electronics down, and sit back to watch it set. I kid you not. You do the same for the two heart-rate monitors and then you run wires from the heart-rate monitors to the electronics. And you don’t want the wires floating about, so you epoxy those down here and there as well. When you recapture the seal you remove the electronics unit but not the mounting or the epoxy. Then later in the year the seal molts, epoxy and all. Grows new fir and voila, good as new. Apparently except for the part about being captured the seals don’t seem to mind any of this much at all.

 

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