By the time we left the Amundsen Sea on March 4, 2014 a total of 15 seal tags had been attached to 7 Elephant and 8 Weddell Seals. For more detail on the seal tagging ops check out the post from Feb. Quickly, the elephant seals finished their molt and moved off from the haulout. The worry of the Sea Mammal biologists was that they would leave the Amundsen Sea and move out into the Southern Ocean. The Weddell Seals are more reliable in that they tend to stay close to the ice.

Happily for us, none of the seals has left the Amundsen Sea and they have done a marvelous job of spreading distributing themselves through out the Sea and Pine Island Bay, all of which is very promising. It will be fascinating to watch their distribution as the sea ice advances moving into the winter months. In the mean time, the data comes streaming in. We can observe the warm water on the continental shelf, usually below 500-600 m. From the two graphs below, the figure out left shows profiles from a Weddell seal female and on the right from an Elephant seal female. From the graphs, you can see how much deeper the elephant seals go when they dive!

 

Source: Mike Fedak, SMRU (http://www.smru.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Source: Mike Fedak, SMRU (http://www.smru.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Weddell seal female (left) dive profiles and (right) elephant seal female dive profiles. Source: Mike Fedak, SMRU (http://www.smru.st-andrews.ac.uk/