Weddell Seal Science

Some Cool Weddell Pupping Season Highlights So Far

It's now past peak Weddell seal pupping time, and the field team is working hard to survey all of the seals in the Erebus Bay, Antarctica study area this season. These full surveys require that the team moves through the entire study area, visiting all of the Weddell seal colonies in around 24 hours, to log all the seals sighted. They will do this many times. This is to account for as many seals as possible since many of the seals will be swimming underwater at any one time.

Field team researcher going from seal to seal recording data on every seal encountered during a survey.
Photo by Mary Lynn Price, NMFS Permit No. 1032-1917.

The team also encounters pups born later on in the pupping season, and records them, their moms, and the locations of their births. It's a busy time for the field team!

The entire 2022 field team with the New Zealand Prime Minister (center) on the National Science Foundation's
chalet deck, McMurdo Station. Dr. Jay Rotella is 2nd from right. Photo by NSF staff. 

So far, there have been a number of field season highlights this year. A cool highlight was a recent visit by the New Zealand Prime Minister, Right Honourable Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern, to whom a brief on the population project's work was presented. New Zealand's Antarctica Station Scott Base is very near the US McMurdo Station, and a couple of the Weddell seal colonies are quite close to Scott Base.

Rare old Weddell mom ties record for oldest mom at 32 yrs-old, with record-setting 23rd pup.
Photo by Parker Levinson.

Another 2022 highlight is the team encounter with a rare old Weddell mom who is 32 years old and with her 23rd pup. This mom ties the record for oldest Weddell seal ever documented, and sets a new record for most pups born over a lifetime to a single Weddell seal mom.

Rare 4 yr-old Weddell mom with 1st pup. Photo by Mairan Smith.

On the opposite end of the age spectrum, this season the team also encountered a 4 year-old Weddell mom with her 1st pup. It is very rare for a Weddell seal to give birth at that young age. There have been only two other 4 year-old Weddell moms recorded in the multi-decade Weddell population study. Weddells usually begin having pups when they are around 7 or 8 years old.

This season the field team encountered a very light-colored Weddell pup, which is very unusual. "It's the only one colored like this that I've seen here," notes project lead scientist, Dr. Jay Rotella. Photo above by field team member Brandon Davis.

This very cool aerial video by Dr. Jay Rotella shows the Weddell pupping colony at Turtle Rock in the Erebus Bay study area, and gives a sense of just how vast the area is, with seals beginning to gather around this small island and active volcano Mt. Erebus in the background.

A video by field team member Mairan Smith of an adorable talkative little Weddell pup has gone totally viral on Instagram with over 22 million views and rising! Check out our amazing Instagram page managed by Sophia Rotella, Montana State University student and daughter of project lead scientist Dr. Jay Rotella. Most photos and videos are accompanied by interesting educational info on the seals and the science work.

And finally, this season we launched the Weddell Seal Science Audio Podcast. Much of our multimedia outreach over the past 12 years has been primarily focused on written material, images, and award-winning short videos, so it's been fun to work in more of a radio environment, telling short science stories with interviews and natural sounds. In all, this has been one amazing Weddell seal pupping season so far!

- Mary Lynn Price

 

Five Weddell Seal Short Videos by Jeremy Schmidt

From Jeremy Schmidt, Weddell seal population project multimedia specialist:

For a quick, light-hearted introduction, check out these five easy short pieces. A mother seal lying on the ice doesn’t look like one of the most amazing animals on Earth. She’s big, for sure, but not speedy, not what you might expect from a top-level marine carnivore. She might raise her head and look at you for a moment. Maybe even open her mouth in a gaping yawn. Then back to sleep. Show’s over.

Her pup is a small version of the same behavior. Pups are very cute; in fact maybe the cutest baby mammal on Earth, with their big eyes and curious gaze. But even the pups seem mostly interested in just two things. First is sleeping. Second is nursing, which they do whenever they aren’t sleeping. As they get bigger, they will sometimes slip under the ice and swim around for a while, often with their moms, and then it’s out of the water and back to sleep.

Ho hum? Hardly. There’s so much more than that to know about Weddell seals. Even when they’re just lying on the ice in a pupping colony, there’s a lot going on that we don’t see, or that takes a long time to understand. 

In more than 50 years, the Weddell Seal Population Project has learned a great deal about the hidden side of seals — and produced videos that dive deep into the data. Those are available on our website.

Last but certainly not least, a short vid about Weddell Seal Super Moms which was completed before the most recent Super Mom encounters. The search continues!

- Jeremy Schmidt

Talking Baby Weddell Seal Video Goes Viral!

A short video of a very expressive and vocal Weddell seal pup by Antarctica field crew member Mairan Smith was recently posted on the Weddell Seal Science Instagram page, and has quickly gone totally viral. Our Instagram page is managed and curated by Sophie Rotella, daughter of lead scientist Dr. Jay Rotella. As of early morning November 10, the Instagram video had been viewed 3.4 million times and rising. Watch the new Talking Pup video on our Weddell Seal Science Instagram page! 

- Mary Lynn Price

Field Team Documents Record-Tying Youngest Weddell Mom With 1st Pup!

Update By Parker Levinson, MS Student and 2022 Field Crew Leader:

This has been a year for the record books. Based on how many pups we’ve tagged so far, we predict that it’s going to be one of the highest pup totals in our over 40-year-long data series. In a year with so many females producing pups, we’re seeing a record number of immigrant mothers and have already tagged more than 80 mothers who are new to our study area. We’re also seeing a record number of first-time mothers ranging from ages 4-17. 

Weddell seal females typically give birth to their first pups when they are 7 or 8 years old. This is because it takes many years for seals to reach sufficient body size and energetic quality to produce and raise a pup since lactation is very energetically costly. Females reach maximum body mass in their teens and so are still growing when they first start giving birth at younger ages.

Record-tying 4-year-old Weddell mom with her 1st pup photographed by field team member Mairan Smith.

This year amongst the many mothers, the team identified a 4-year-old mom wearing tags 8070C. To us that is really cool as this is the youngest age for a mom that's ever been recorded over the past 40 years, and 8070C is among a handful of seals to produce a pup at such a young age. The last confirmed 4-year-old mom observed was recorded back in 2000. We’re able to trace 8070's lineage back 4 generations. She was born to an 11-year-old mother in 2018, and her mom is still producing pups. In fact, this year, her mom gave birth to her 8th pup at Hutton Cliffs, which is a colony a few miles away from where 8070C gave birth. 8070C’s grandmother was born in 1997 to an immigrant mother, showing that immigrant mothers may contribute to the Erebus Bay population in ways we don’t yet understand. 

Aerial image showing where the 4-year-old Weddell mom was born at Hutton Cliffs
and where she was very recently documented with her first pup at Knob Point.
Annotated image by Dr. Jay Rotella.

Aside from tracing this lineage to satisfy my own curiosity, it opens the door to all sorts of research questions about this 4-year-old mom. Did she have an exceptional mother that also started pupping early in life and was able to somehow set her up for success? Was she born in a really good environmental year that helped her reach sufficient mass at an early age? Is she going to produce many pups in her life? Perhaps it’s less about the 4-year-old and more about what’s going on with the environment this year that has allowed so many females to reproduce in this study area. Was it a really good winter with lots of prey availability? Is the next winter going to be very productive so that mothers can regain body mass and pups can have an easier time foraging? 

We’ve only ever seen a few 4-year-old mothers in the past 40 years on this project, so we’re curious about what is going on that allowed her to have a pup so early. We’re fortunate to be part of a long-term study that has decades of historic data to help us understand what’s special about this year that resulted in her producing a pup and as we continue the project forward, we’ll be able to follow her in future years to see what she does with the rest of her life. 

- Parker Levinson (she/her) 

2022 Field Team Members Interview Each Other In Latest Podcast Episode

The 2022 Antarctica field team is working very hard to complete the Weddell Seal Population Project's work with the Weddells of Erebus Bay before the sea ice gets too thin to access.

During a recent day on McMurdo Station waiting for the weather to clear, several members of the field crew took time to interview each other about working with these amazing predators in Antarctica, what they've learned, and what surprised them most. We hope you enjoy the new Weddell Seal Science Audio Podcast episode!

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify.

- Mary Lynn Price, multimedia specialist

Field Team Records New Record-Setting Old Weddell SuperMom!

Report From The Field By Dr. Jay Rotella On Record-Setting Old Weddell Mom And 23rd Pup:

The team documented a record-tying and record-setting female Weddell seal this week. A Weddell seal mother wearing blue tags with the numbers 0550 on them (we refer to her as 0550C - “C” denotes the tag color, it's “C” for cerulean), was sighted at the Hutton Cliffs colony with a newborn pup. While tagging her pup and recording the information on the pup and mom, our field computer let us know that the mom is 32-years old and has had 22 pups in previous years.

Photo by Parker Levinson of record-setting oldest Weddell Seal SuperMom with her 23rd pup.

Such numbers are so rare to see that we looked up the full details on this mom at the end of the day on a computer with the full database for all the marking and resighting data that have been collected on almost 30,000 seals from 1978 to present. What we learned is that 0550C ties the record for the longest known lifespan: only 1 other seal (also a female with a pup) is known to have survived to 32 years of age even though thousands were tagged long enough ago to have had the chance. And by giving birth to her 23rd pup in 2022, she sets a new record for the number of pups produced by a single female in a lifetime.

Photo by Parker Levinson of record-setting oldest Weddell Seal SuperMom with her 23rd pup.

Earlier researchers on the project tagged 0550C in 1990 at the Turtle Rock colony. She was next sighted as a pre-breeder when she was 5-years old at Turtle Rock quite close to where she was born. She returned to Turtle Rock again the next year and produced her first pup at age 6, which is a year or 2 younger than what’s typical for age at first reproduction. At 7 years of age, she produced a pup at Turks Head, which is about 5 miles away in a straight line. Since then, she has typically given birth to a pup at Hutton Cliffs and done so in every year.

Map of annual locations of new Weddell SuperMom prepared using Quantarctica by Dr. Jay Rotella.

In fact, she has produced a pup in 23 of the last 27 years. Further, she has been sighted multiple times during every pupping season from 1995 through 2022. The accompanying map, which was produced in Quantarctica, shows her annual locations. The number next to each colored dot indicates her age when she was at that location. The color of a dot indicates her breeding state: pink is for years when she did not produce a pup (i.e., when she was a pup, a pre-breeder, or was skipping reproduction), red indicates where she was when she was a 1st-time mom, and green is where she was when she was an experienced mother. Many of the dots are on top of one another because her pupping locations have been in such similar spots and the dots are on top of one another for quite a few years.

Photo by Parker Levinson of new Weddell SuperMom showing worn teeth.

Our field crew leader, Parker Levinson, patiently photographed the mom and her pup with a telephoto lens, above. Based on seeing the mom and her pup in the field and reviewing the photos, her pup looks very healthy, and 0550C looks generally healthy as well. But she definitely shows some signs of aging. Notably, her left eye is a bit cloudy and has a growth in the corner of the eye. And, her upper canine and outer incisor teeth show quite a bit of wear, which is not surprisingly given that mothers gnaw the ice with their teeth to open breathing holes and to make nice smooth ramps that make it easier for young pups to exit from the water after swimming when just a couple of weeks old. However, we didn’t see any evidence of any abscess or fractured teeth, both of which were reported in Weddell seals, in a 1969 paper that Ian Stirling wrote about tooth wear in the species.

Photo by Parker Levinson of record-setting oldest Weddell Seal SuperMom with her 23rd pup.

We are interested in looking up how many of her daughters and sons have shown up again since being born and if any of her daughters have been seen with pups. Perhaps some of them might be strong reproducers as well. Perhaps she will return again in 2023 and other future years and produce even more pups. Of course, only time will tell. One has to be patient to learn about such females: 32 years is a pretty long time!

- Dr. Jay Rotella, Lead Scientist on the Weddell Seal Population Study