Nicole Teutschel, at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA - Flora had the E-Seal team members scratching our heads...here's why. Flora is a featured elephant seal for the Elephant Seals Homecoming Days, and one of the twenty female elephant seals returning with satellite tags this season.

The TOPP E-Seal team spends a lot of time “resighting”. That's a fancy way of saying that we hike around Año Nuevo to keep track of all the tagged females. One of the most important observations that the E-Seal team makes this time of year, is whether or not females with satellite tags have given birth to their pup. Satellite tags are recovered when the seal’s pup is five days old. This keeps all of our measurements standardized while ensuring that we’ve giving mom and pup more than enough time to bond.

This is the pup that was accompanied by Flora on the day we recovered her satellite tag.

Flora was sighted interacting with her newborn pup on January 24^th. When the E-Seal team set out 5 days later to recover her tags, we found Flora and a pup with an umbilical cord! Newborn e-seal pups tend to loose their umbilical cord in the first few days of life. We have yet to see a 4- or 5-day-old pup with an umbilicus. While Flora’s pup was clearly no more than a few days old, the E-Seal team members decided that we would observe her for a while before going in and retrieving the tags.

Here's Flora and...her?....a?...pup when we first set out to recover her tags. Because of the umbilical cord (shown above) and Flora's interaction with this pup AND other surrounding pups, the TOPP team decided to recover the tags at a later date.

After watching Flora sniffing other pups, fighting with other females, and interacting with the young pup at her side, we decided to abort the tag recovery. We didn’t want to interfere with the bonding---and Flora appeared a little confused.

After waiting another few days, we hiked back out to North Point yesterday. We recovered the tags from Flora, BUT we operated with extreme caution, with the possibility in mind that this pup that she was nursing now is one that she adopted…and their bond might not be as strong as other seal-pup pairs. After the procedure, the team started the reuniting process. This is where we put the pup next to its mom and observe any interaction. It was a piece of cake! Flora was barking, nursing, and nose-to-nose with her pup within minutes of coming out of anesthesia. Still the E-Seal team is glad that they made the call to hold off on the recovery. It's always better to be safe.

After recovering the satellite tag, we weighed Flora. She's in the big red sling and being cranked up. The pup is close by ready for Flora to wake up (above). The pup (below) watched Flora throughout the procedure, rarely taking his eyes off her.

It’s unclear whether this pup is actually Flora’s. There are a few possible explanations:

-- Flora had a pup, lost it and adopted this one.

-- Flora never had a pup and was caring for different orphan pups.

-- Flora was interacting with an orphan before she had her own, the pup shown here.

We’ll never really know, but it’s clear now that Flora and the pup shown here are bonded. We put a flipper tag on the pup. This will be allow us to follow it throughout the remainder of the breeding season, weaning, and post-weaning fast. We’ll blog about this little pup’s status soon.

The pup's new flipper tag: with its unique identification number U579.