Special Report From Lead Project Scientist, Dr. Jay Rotella:
We are fortunate to be able to field a research team this season. Because of logistics limitations and challenges, we will be able to have a team of 3 rather than 6 on the ice from mid-October until approximately mid-December. Also, the team will work from McMurdo Station rather than from a field camp out on the sea ice. Despite the challenges, our team will be able to make progress on the core objectives of our project.
In particular, the team will be able to maintain the long-term database, which is, of course, valuable in its own right and quite critical to our current project. Over the last decade, we have collected data on body mass and maternal features for a large sample of pups. Our current project is focused on determining which of those pups have (a) survived, (b) become mothers, (c) reproduced the most and (d) evaluating how those outcomes relate to features of the pup’s mother, her maternal investment in the pup, and the environmental conditions the pup has experienced.
Our team of 3 will be able to identify all mothers and associate all pups with their mothers. This will be very valuable for keeping the data on individual reproductive histories intact, and for identifying which of the pups we worked on in past years have become mothers (a core objective of our current grant).
The team will also conduct our surveys of the population and collect data that are crucial to knowing the population’s size and to gaining information on survival of males and females that were observed in previous years of the study. The team will conduct fewer surveys than is typical and conduct surveys over the course of 2-3 days rather than in a single day. The team also plans to survey the more remote colony of seals at White Island at least once, which we do every year with helicopter support, to maintain the database on White Island seals. We are really pleased to be able to continue the project, and look forward to what we can learn this year.
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