Nicole Teutschel at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA -- Sometimes recovering a satellite tag is a dangerous endeavor and can take hours. That's the way it was with Annie, the ninth named seal whose tag we needed to retrieve.

Annie gave birth to her pup in the middle of a large harem called Bight Beach South. Female seals covet this area: it’s flat, sandy and far enough from the high-tide mark that waves don't hit them. Hundreds of animals crowd the area. So, when a seal whose tag needs removing lies smack dab in the middle of an area like this, you know it's going to be a very tough day.

Bight Beach South, Annie's harem, on the border of Año Point Gully, another very large harem.

The E-Seal team met up at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab before dawn that morning and quickly set out to Año. We needed extra time to slowly move through the harem to keep disturbance to a minimum in the colony. When all you see is elephant seal bodies and little sand for hundreds of feet, making your way through a sea of 1,000-pound-plus wild animals who don't think twice about trying to bite you seems daunting. But the E-Seal team has methods to reach seals that are in challenging spots.

Annie at her recovery, keeping close eye on the sneaky E-Seal team.

We crouched down and slowly inched in, and, as we inched, the animals inched away. Pretty soon, we created a path to Annie. But then, we had to inject medication to sedate her. Notice Annie's very large brown eyes? She never took them off us. We used all our tricks: We waved tarps, we waved our hats. We jumped up and down. Finally, she turned just enough, and one of us darted in, and injected the drug in her.

Next step: Retrieve the satellite, time-depth-recorder and radio tags....while keeping other females at bay. Most of the time, they ignore us. But then, for no reason, completely out of the blue, one decides that we've been there too long, or she doesn't like what we're doing, or she doesn't like the way we talk....who knows, with elephant seals. Whatever the insult, she comes after us. So we always have to watch what all the other seals are doing, and in this case, with the harem surrounding us, that meant a lot of head-swiveling and occasionally getting bigger than the charging seals and waving tarps and hats to keep them away and the sedated female and her pup safe.

Researchers had to regroup and try different ways to inject the medicine needed to sedate Annie for the tag recovery. As you can see in this image, her big brown eyes followed us the entire time. There was no way to take her by surprise.

Because hormones are running wild in the harem these days, with females going into estrus and males picking up the scent, the other thing we had to worry about were the males lurking at the edge of the harem. Mating, defending their harem or fighting a male that's defending his harem is all that's on their minds. And when they're ready to fight, they see nothing but the other male, and they'll run over anything -- pups, females, researchers -- in their path. They lumber through the harem like silent freight trains. Unlike females, they make no noise as they charge. There's a distinctive vibration that a two-ton animal makes as it undulates across sand. We jumped up and ran out of the way more than once!

A male sneaking into the harem, causing another male behind us to react, and later fight him. This was a common occurrence during this recovery, which put the E-Seal team on high alert. Annie's at the bottom right.

After all the sand had settled, the E-Seal team retrieved the tags, reunited Annie with her pup, and made it back out of the harem unscathed. Another successful day at Año Nuevo, and 9 tags recovered from featured seals! Cheddar is the only seal still wearing her tags. We'll be heading down the coast this weekend in an attempt to recover them.