Melinda Fowler, at UCSC's Long Marine Lab -- May has been an intense month. We just deployed our 20th satellite tag this week. All our tags were deployed on adult female elephant seals.

These seals will carry their tags until they return in late December to early January to give birth to their pups. In the meantime, their tags will transmit their positions daily and their time-depth recorders will record their diving patterns.

Melinda Fowler at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab - We started putting satellite tags on a new set of female elephant seals who will head to the ocean later this month for their long migration -- seven to nine months in the place they call home most of their lives -- the cold North Pacific Ocean.

Melinda Fowler, UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab -- The female elephant seals we tagged this winter are returning early, and our satellite tag recoveries are starting off with a bang! Satellite tags were deployed on 23 adult female elephant seals from Año Nuevo during the breeding season, in late January and early February. Females normally forage for about 3 months before returning to land to molt—at which time we recover the tags. This year seems to be a bit of an exception, as the females are coming back in dr