Jane Stevens at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab -- With luck, this female elephant seal will head out to sea soon, and, in about three months, bring back the first video of an elephant seal eating.....squid? ratfish? shark? Researchers know that elephant seals eat these, because they've found tiny remnants of these species in their stomachs. But they don't know where they're eating, or how often, or exactly what species.

This elephant seal is the first one of her species to carry a video camera on a foraging trip. (The researchers wish that the camera could transmit the video in real time, but there's no way to do that yet and still make it small enough for the seal to carry.) On Sunday, TOPP researcher Dan Costa and Randall Davis, a marine biology professor at Texas A&M University, led the group that attached a video camera to her at Año Nuevo State Reserve.

When Costa and Davis were graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, they put the first time-depth recorders on elephant seals. That data revealed the amazing yo-yo lives these seals live: 20- to 40-minute dives to 1,000 to 2,000 feet, separated by a few minutes at the surface, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They chose this seal because she's ready to return to the ocean. She spent the last month nursing her pup, who's very fat now, in the North Point harem and she's ready to chow down her first meal in weeks. (By the way, those aren't tears of sadness streaming from her eyes -- seals emit fluid to flush their eyes of sand and other debris blown into their eyes on the beach.) 

The E-Seal team and TOPP researcher Dan Crocker, a professor at Sonoma State University, did the grunt work of selecting and anesthetizing the seal, taking measurements and blood samples, monitoring her anesthesia and breathing, and, finally weighing her. The E-Seal team was led by graduate student Jason Hassrick, with able assistance from graduate students Cory Champagne, Melinda Fowler, and Stella Villegas, and undergraduate Nicole Teutschel (who's also the social networking education and outreach coordinator for Elephant Seals Homecoming Days). Former Costa lab post-doc Ken Yoda flew in from Japan with his accelerometers, which he put on the jaws of two seals, including this one, to record their movements. That might tell us how often they eat, especially if Yoda can correlate the accelerometer data with the action in the video.

Bill Hagey, of Pisces Design in La Jolla, CA, engineered and organized attaching the video camera apparatus, which is powered by 12 lithium batteries. A small hard disk records the video, which, with any luck, the E-Seal team will recover once the seal returns and molts.The disk can record 17 hours....about 50 dives. Other sensors measure oxygen, swim speed, temperature, and will track her dives in three dimensions. There's a GPS tag on the back of the video camera, plus a couple of other satellite tags to track her.

Why is it important to put this apparatus on the seal? It's going to help us (that's all of you and all of us...we're all in this together) obtain one more piece of the puzzle to manage a sustainable ocean ecosystem. If we know where the seals go, what they eat, where they find their food, how much they eat, and what the environment is like in which all this happens, then we can make sure that their food and environment are protected. At least that's the plan. The video camera pack that this seal is wearing weighs about three pounds. Davis and Hagey have put video cameras on about 300 Weddell seals in Antarctica over the last few years, with great success for the researchers and the seals. Davis has about 500 hours of video from Weddell seals. We'll show you that in a later blog posting.