Jason Hassrick from the Eseal Lab. I want to know how fast elephant seal whiskers grow. So what am I doing? Sending them to a lab in La Paz, Mexico.

Each pair of whiskers is worth $1,000. Not because that's how much an elephant seal is worth (they're priceless!). But that's how much the glycine costs that I injected into each female elephant seal.

When we put satellite tags on some female elephant seals in January, I plucked one whisker, then injected the seal with a little bit of glycine. This tiny little bottle cost $5,000. You can see how small it is here, in the box with the styrofoam peanuts. Then the seal left for 2 months. When the seal returned in March, we removed the satellite tags and I plucked another whisker.

Glycine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in proteins found in animals, including us humans. But this glycine has a slightly different type of nitrogen than what occurs naturally in our bodies – each nitrogen atom has the same number of protons in its nucleus, but different numbers of neutrons. That difference will enable the researchers in the lab in Mexico to “see” it, so that we can figure out how fast whiskers grow.

Why do I want to know how fast elephant seal whiskers grow? Because a lot of us who care about elephant seals want to know where their feeding grounds are in the ocean. We’re making great strides in learning about these animals. In the last few years, thanks to satellite tagging technology, we’ve been able to see where they go, and we can guess that they might be feeding in areas where they hang out for a while. But we really don’t know.

Whiskers could give us information about that. Once we know how fast the whiskers grow, we will be able to track the changes in nitrogen and carbon that occur as the seals go out to sea and match these changes to where they might be feeding in the ocean. Knowing where they feed helps us identify what we call ocean "hot spots", where a lot of other animals, including tuna and different types of sharks, also feed.

Until elephant seals can speak Spanish, Japanese or some other language, or if we could speak elephant seal, this is one of our ways of getting at that answer.

If you want to hear more about how elephant seals tell us more about the ocean, check out a story that John Nielsen did on NPR on June 30, 2007: Scientists Use Elephant Seals to Monitor Oceans.