Dr. Elizabeth Flesch, MSU postdoctoral genomics researcher and 2023 field team member, has arrived safely at McMurdo Station for her first visit to Antarctica. She will receive training in sea ice safety, then join the rest of the field team working in the Erebus Bay Weddell seal pupping colonies.
Elizabeth (she/her) notes upon arrival, "I look forward to seeing the seals in person after working with their genetic data on a computer for the past several months! Genetic tools provide an exciting opportunity for us to potentially identify from where immigrant seals originated. Similar to human ancestry services, we can study DNA from seals to understand who is related to whom. This season we are sampling other seal colonies that are possible sources of immigration to serve as a comparison to locally born seals."
We look very much forward to covering more of the Weddell seal population genomics work in future posts!
Comments