Where's Cheddar?

Posted January 21st, 2008 by JaneStevens
in

Jane Stevens at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA - When will she hit the beach? Six of the ten named elephant seals have returned to the beach -- Myoceen, Isabel, Penelope, Guadalupe, Flora and Mukurma. But Cheddar keeps dallying around, just offshore. She's been a bit of mystery seal, anyway. She was born at Año Nuevo State Reserve nine years ago, but returned for the first time last summer. We don't know how many pups she's had, or if she's had any. Maybe she's still making up her mind about coming to Año Nuevo....maybe the other beach she migrated to the last nine years is calling to her, too?

Nicole Teutschel has been watching her track every day. One day, she was so close to the beach that Nicole and Meagan Oldfather thought she might have landed. So they went to find her.


Here are some images of Cheddar's Tracks.

Cheddar's blue tracks show her path as she swam away from Año Nuevo State Reserve last summer. Last month, she began heading back. Most seals make a beeline, more or less, back to Año Nuevo. Not Cheddar. She's been zig-zagging down the coast for a month, and her latest tracks, in red, show her moseying around off Santa Cruz. (Ignore the dots on land....those are obviously errors. Not even wayward Cheddar could undulate over the mountains behind Santa Cruz without someone noticing.)

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She's moved again!

On January 31st, 2008 Anonymous says:

We thought that Cheddar had finally landed at San Simeon. We drove down and laid eyes on her to be sure. Sure enough, she was at the waters edge in a vast group of seals and we thought it was just a matter of a few days until she would give birth. Not so fast. Just two days after we returned to Ano Nuevo, her satellite transmitter showed her moving out to sea again! Did she decide to come back to her native breeding grounds at Ano Nuevo? Or, did she simply return only long enough to be mated because her womb was vacant? If so, it will be at least a month or two before we will see her again, when she makes her next trip back to the beach to molt.