Ashley Pearson at Año Nuevo State Reserve, CA-- If you went to Año Nuevo every day for a week, do you think you could start to tell individual seals from one another?  Although we can tell some seals apart using physical attributes, genetically speaking, northern elephant seals are all almost identical!  Northern e seals are so similar genetically, that it is hard to identify who fathered a pup – even with a  paternity test!

Ashley Pearson at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA-- The E Seal Team spends a lot of time on the beach resighting, tagging, weighing, measuring, and collecting samples.  However, the E Seal Team's day doesn't end when we leave the beautiful Año Nuevo State Reserve coastlines.  Back to the lab we enter loads of data!  In the field we keep track of seals that we have seen so that we can enter it into our databases. We use the databases to track information like:

Ashley Pearson at Año Nuevo State Reserve, CA-- The TOPP Team went out to Año Nuevo State Reserve to recover, or take off, satellite, time-depth-recorder and radio tags from Josephine the northern elephant seal, or E Seal.

Ashley Pearson at Año Nuevo State Reserve, CA-- Last Thursday we went to recover Featherfoot’s tags from Año Nuevo only to find that someone else had already claimed them...A populations of barnacles had attached themselves to her head and back tags giving her some pieces of flair to show off!

Ashley Pearson at Año Nuevo State Reserve, CA-- Hey, I'm Ashley Pearson!  Nice to meet you, TOPP.org!  I'm a senior biology major at UCSC, and I'm doing a senior thesis through the Costa lab at Long Marine Lab.  As part of my thesis, I have become a member of the TOPP E Seal team!  From time to time I will blog about the my project and the animals we work with.