This Weddell seal population study, initiated by Don Siniff in the late 1960s, is one of the longer running
animal population studies, and the longest marine mammal population study in the
southern hemisphere. 

One of the benefits of such a long-running study is the extensive database built up over the decades on this population of Weddell seals in the Erebus Bay area of Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

Because of this unique data set, Montana State University Weddell seal project
scientists were well positioned to study the
effects of a massive iceberg event in the past decade that blocked the seals’ access to
many of their usual pupping colony locations in the Erebus Bay study area. 

Findings of project scientists were published Sept. 26, 2012 in the international journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.  Lead author of the paper is Thierry Chambert, a doctoral student supervised by Bob Garrott and Jay Rotella in the MSU ecology department.  Rotella and Garrott are co-authors on the paper, and are Co-Principal Investigators on the Weddell seal population project with Don Siniff. 

An abstract of the paper, “Environmental extremes versus ecological extremes: impact of a massive iceberg on the population dynamics of a high-level
Antarctic marine predator,” is now available online at the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences website.

More information is available via the Montana State University News Service.

– Mary Lynn Price