After a day of cargo ops and preparations, the LM Gould left this morning with the ice fish group for a trip to obtain more fish for continued research at Palmer Station. The seal group figured things would slow down, and we would begin to catch up on e-mail and analyzing blood samples taken from the crabeater seals we'd tagged. But then some of the Palmer Station staff told us they'd seen two crabeater seals nearby. So, we loaded up the Zodiacs and took a look.

Among a group of elephant seals that were hauled out on the ice, we found a juvenile crabeater seal. We debated whether we should put a satellite tag on her or not given that she was a juvenile, but a negative decision was easy once we discovered that she had three recent wounds inflicted by a leopard seal. The photo above shows one of her wounds. (For size comparison, I've included a photo of a juvenile elephant seal.)At least this bodes well for the possibility of more crabeater seals hauling out on the shore here at Palmer Station.

After dinner we celebrated Dave Shuman's birthday. He's our field veterinarian. Everyone enjoyed the cake made by the ship's cook, who gave this to us before the Gould departed.