Melinda Fowler at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab--We've recovered 3 satellite tags from female northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Reserve this season.  While that may not seem like a very large number, we've been keeping very busy.  We've been working very hard to locate individuals by their identifying flipper tags to help learn about survivorship, as well as contributing to another project we have going on.  Because of the El Niño weather patterns this year, we are capturing females on the 5th day after they give birth to get a mass measurement.  We are interested to see if they have accrued less mass in an El Niño year, compared with a 'normal' year.  We need to find individuals between 7 and 12 years old, mark them and then observe them so we know when they have a pup.  The stormy weather has made this a difficult task, but we have persevered and now have 13 animals with a mass measurement. 

 Graduate student Nikky Teutschel removes a dive recorder from a tagged seal.  Photo by M. Tift.

Out of the 7 tags deployed in May/June, 6 have returned to the beach.   Three have been recovered and three more females have returned, but have not yet had a pup.  We will be watching them very closely and when they pup, we will wait 5 days and then remove their tags and weigh them as well.