Special Report from 2020 Field Team Leader, Kaitlin MacDonald:
Our crew has now completed the 2020 field season and we are awaiting the arrival of a LC-130 cargo plane that will take us back to Christchurch and eventually our homes in the US.
This year was quite different from any of my previous for a number of reasons. Due to the pandemic reductions in personnel that were made across McMurdo station our crew was reduced to three people. This year we had unusual sea ice conditions with the ice edge basically ending at the Erebus Glacier Tongue. For our crew this meant no Big Razorback field camp and more importantly only helicopter access to the northside of our study area. During this unusual season we were able to get quite a bit done despite the challenges we faced.
If you’ve been following along this year you will know we set-up two emergency camps with tents, food and fuel in case we were stuck in poor weather on either side of our study area. On the North side of the study area this is where we would land and stage our snowmobiles. Our last few days on the sea ice were spent deconstructing these camps and getting the gear back to McMurdo.
One of our snowmobiles is rigged to be transported back to McMurdo
Our largest success this season was tagging pups in the study area. We were able to tag all pups that were safely accessible in our study area and make the association between pups and mothers for most pups that were tagged. We ended up tagging over 500 pups this year. This was an important task for our crew as it allows us to know whether a seal was born in the study area, provides us with ages of individuals, and allows us to record reproductive histories for adult females.
Will and Parker prepare to tag a pup
This year we continued our mass dynamics work weighing a subset of mothers and pups. We also deployed temperature tags on the pups that we weighed. While we were able to get mid-lactation masses for nearly all pups enrolled, due to deteriorating sea ice conditions the sea ice was closed to travel, and we were unable to get weaning masses for the majority of pups.
A fully molted pup catches some zzz's at Hutton Cliffs
In addition to weighing pups and photographing mothers the latter half of our season was spent doing study area surveys and retagging individuals that were missing full tag sets. We were very happy to have the time to retag adults with less than full tag sets as this work will ensure that we continue to get individual data for these seals. Our study area wide surveys can be quite long days because we spend these days making sure we record the tag numbers of every seal that is accessible within the study area. With only three of us our study area wide surveys took a bit longer and the number completed was reduced from a normal year, but we were still able to get these valuable data.
The 2020 crew at the end of our final survey (from left to right: Kaitlin, Parker, and Will).
Our crew had the great fortune to spot three of the iconic Antarctic species during our work on the sea ice. We spotted a number of Adélie penguins, a large group of emperor penguins, and a pair of snow petrels!
Emperor penguins at North Base
While this year was one of the more unusual for B-009 we are grateful to have the opportunity to continue our long-term study this year. We are thankful to the contractors and support staff at McMurdo who worked so hard to make our field season a reality! We couldn’t have achieved as much as we did without the hard work of Parker and Will, who stepped up to the challenge as first year crew members making this season fun and successful!
- Kaitlin MacDonald