Dan Costa, aboard the Yuzomegeologia, Drake Passage, Antarctica -- We recently returned to the ship after spending the last few weeks on Cape Shirreff. Given the limited e-mail capacity of the Cape Shirreff field station, I was not able to send e-mail updates or images.

However, we are now on the ship on our way home to Punta Arenas, Chile. As I write this we are about 2/3 the way across the Drake Passage. The weather has been kind and it's sunny outside. While the seas are ok, they are not as calm as our voyage down to the Cape. We are excited to be returning to civilization after a month in the field.

Our work has gone extremely well. As I mentioned in the earlier e-mails, the major reason for my trip was to deploy 12 CTD (salinity-temperature-depth) tags on southern elephant seals. This was part of a collaborative between U.C. Santa Cruz and the U.S. Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program (AMLR), co-funded by the National Science Foundation and AMLR. I was also assisting Mike Goebel with his ongoing fur seal research as part of the AMLR program. In addition, Mike wanted to see if we could tag leopard seals! I'’m pleased to say that we figured out how to sedate leopard seals, and attached satellite telemetry tags and dive recorders to 4 leopard seals! As the e-mail capacity of the ship is also quite limited, I'll send a few updates over the next few days, but once we reach shore I will send a series of images detailing our work here.
Here's a southern elephant seal with a CTD tag attached. These tags provide detailed information about where the animals go and how deep they dive. They also report on the oceanographic conditions where the animal is diving. These data are valuable to understand not only the animals behavior relative to the oceanography, but also provide data on the oceanographic conditions in regions that are difficult if not impossible to get any other way.