Special Report From Prof. Jay Rotella:

Thanks to the clever thinking and incredible graphic design skills of Liz Widen, an Instrument Technician at McMurdo Station who works with many science teams in the Crary Science Building, our research team has started running a science-based outreach event called “Fat Pup Week”.

Crary Lab Instrument Tech Liz Widen and Project PhD Student Parker Levinson
describe the 2024 Fat Seal Pup project on McMurdo Station, with participation
this year including US South Pole and Palmer Stations, and New Zealand Scott Base!

The contest is loosely modeled after “Fat Bear Week”, where the public votes for “the fattest, most successful Katmai bear" (https://katmaiconservancy.org). The Weddell seal team selected 16 Weddell seal pups from different pupping colonies and chose pups that were noticeably large and heavy, characteristics that we predict enhance a pup’s chances of surviving to adulthood. Liz then presented all the information in an organized and digestible way for folks at McMurdo to make informed decisions on which is the fattest pup in Erebus Bay.

People at McMurdo Station were asked to submit names for the pups, and the 16 pups were then put in a bracket involving 15 head-to-head matches to determine the overall winner. Some of the names included “Rolli Cannoli”, “Blob the Builder”, “Puptimus Prime”, “Galumphing Gulper”, “Meatball”, and “Pupperoni”. A printed version of the bracket was hung just outside the McMurdo cafeteria/galley where members of the community could see photos and bios for each of the seal pups and learn of their colony location, age of their mother, and other interesting/fun facts about the pups and the seals in general. For each head-to-head matchup, the McMurdo community’s members, who do so much to support our project, voted for the winner on tally sheets hung next to the bracket. Just like in the NCAA basketball tournaments held each spring, Fat Pup Week winners of each round move on in a single-elimination format. The event has garnered a lot of attention from the community and it's common to see clusters of people gathered around the Fat Pup Week billboard having lively discussions of the names, the pictures, and their favored contestants. With one contest per day, Fat Pup Week actually extends over approximately weeks and ends with a winner being crowned during the Thanksgiving holiday celebration.

Hundreds of people from McMurdo Station participated: about 1/3 of the people currently on Station voted. It’s been a fun way to engage people in our project and has led to lots of great questions and exchanges between our team’s members and other community members. Fat Pup Week has expanded as interest has grown, and community members of South Pole Station and New Zealand’s Scott Base Station are also now voting for contest winners. This year, the project’s Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/weddellsealscience/), which is run by team member Sophia Rotella, has made it possible for friends and family of members of the United States Antarctic Program to participate by voting online. Many of the 100,000 followers of the project’s Instagram page have also enjoyed participating in the voting. We’re really excited by how many people have engaged with our project’s science through this outreach effort. We also really appreciate the time that Liz Widen and the members of our team have put into collecting photos of the pups, organizing the bracket, and getting the bracket and voting sheets up and monitored. 

– Prof. Jay Rotella