King George Island Expedition

Bull southern elephant seals in a moulting aggregation at King George Island.Southern elephant seals are among the oceans' supreme pelagics.  They spend most of their lives beneath the surface: between briefly "hauling out" on land to breed and moult they spend months at sea, travelling thousands of kilometres and diving up to 2 kilometres in search of their squid and fish prey.

To study their at-sea movements and behaviour, data logging instruments are attached to individuals and these relay information via satellite when the animals surface.  Through the instruments they carry, the animals also collect masses of precision oceanographic data - used to model our climate and oceans - from areas difficult to reach using traditional methods.  These aims are encapsulated in Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) and various other projects.

We have been deploying such instruments on elephant seals at Marion Island for a number of years (as part of MEOP in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute [AWI] in Germany) and many of these results are presented in the recent paper "A lifetime at depth" by Trevor McIntyre et al.

Last year Nico de Bruyn and I, together with Horst Bornemann and Jochen Plötz of the AWI, travelled to King George Island/Isla 25 de Mayo off the Antarctic Peninsula to deploy satellite tags on 15 adult male elephant seals.

Our unofficial newsletters - "Met Eish" - can be seen at Issuu:
www.issuu.com/ryanreisinger

The following companies kindly supported us with brilliant cold weather gear:
DUNLOP Protective Footwear
TAIGA Climate Protection Systems
CAPESTORM Outdoor Apparel