That’s Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole. Dan Costa, one of TOPP’s principal investigators, and Mike Fedak, a researcher from the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit who’s also on TOPP’s steering committee, put satellite tags on the first of 12 crabeater seals (that's their goal) in Antarctica. Dan and Mike and their seal-tagging team suffered a roller-coaster ride in a National Science Foundation research vessel, L.M. Gould, across the dreaded Drake Passage from Punta Arenas, Chile. Here’s the Gould in Punta Arenas.

They landed at Palmer Station April 15, where they unpacked their research equipment and prepared for their tagging expedition. On the ship is another team led by Bruce Sidell; while the seal team was prepping, the icefish team spent a few days on the Gould capturing Patagonia toothfish, a type of icefish that doesn’t have red blood cells.

On Saturday, Dan, Mike and the team traded places with the icefish team and headed out to the north end of Adelaide Island into Crystal Sound. They tagged their first crabeater seal, and yesterday, they tagged their second and third, as well as one Weddell seal! They’re doing this for two reasons: to track the movements and diving patterns of seals, and to collect information about the seals’ environment. Oceanographers can use the environmental data to model ocean currents.

The seal-tagging team tagged their first seal on Saturday. They tranquilize the seal and glue a satellite tag to its head. The tag doesn’t affect the seal’s behavior or ability to eat. When the seal molts again, the tag will drop off.

In February, researchers in a sister project tagged 12 elephant seals on the Shetland Islands. It’s a little easier tagging elephant seals than crabeater seals. The elephant seals haul out on beaches. Crabeater seals haul out on ice floes. So, the seal-tagging team has to use a ship to get into ice floes, and then find ice floes that they can climb onto from a Zodiac.

So far, so good. There was one interesting thing to note about yesterday’s work, says Dan: “We see the effects of global warming as the region we operated in all day is listed on our nautical chart as a glacier! In other words, we were in 500-700 meters (1500 to 2100 feet) of water depth where some 20 to 30 years ago there was a glacier!"

Dan will be blogging the rest of the trip. And I’ll be adding a few bits of interesting information, such as: Do you know that crabeater seals don’t eat crabs? Here's the seal team tagging one of the seals yesterday.