Not only is Chacoda a skilled voice artist, he's also pretty romantic! This week he teamed up with Lindsay to help this lovely young couple get engaged! Below are some screen shots of what happened. The Boston Globe has the full video here.

How would you like to hear a harbor seal say "hey! hey!" every time your phone rings? Well now you can. The Aquarium's youngest harbor seal, Chacoda, often makes gutteral noises. The trainers have been working with that behavior to see if Chacoda can learn to vocalize like his famous grandfather, Hoover.



Well, sounds like Chuck is getting pretty close to the sound of someone calling out "hey!" Click the play button to hear for yourself and use the links to download an MP3 for your phone.

Download MP3. (Some users may need to right click and select "save" or "save as.")

New England Aquarium Senior Marine Mammal Trainer Patty is participating in the 2010 Northern Fur Seal Pup Count in St. Paul, Alaska. You can scroll through all of her posts from the field here.

A northern fur seal pup snoozing on the rookery.

Remember the challenge at the end of St. Paul: Log #7? Well, how many tags did you find? If you look closely, (and I realize it is a tiny picture on a computer screen) there are three. Here is the picture again with all of the tags circled. Now you can understand why we used binoculars and a scope! The animals are moving quite frequently and a tag can be visible one moment and gone the next so you really need to pay attention.

















The researchers return to the rookeries at the end of breeding season, when the mothers and pups are getting ready to leave the island and migrate. They will remove the tags from the females and use all of the information gathered to help determine the relationship between a marine mammal who spends months on an island but must also travel miles at sea to find food all while raising a pup. Not an easy lifestyle I am sure.

There is still plenty more experiences that I can't wait to share with you so stay tuned!

~Patty

Well, I have seen the last of my shearing days. Today the shearing team I am on is going to finish up at the last of our shearing sights and instead, I am going to learn how to do re-sights. Although the work has been exhausting, I am a little disappointed to miss out on the last day of our team's efforts. I think by day five I was actually able to hold my own and almost keep pace with the more experienced crew members (almost).

The one thing that I never mastered was picking up the pups in a way that prevented them from latching onto my gauntlets. Remember the picture of me in my lovely shearing outfit? Well the leather wrap that went from my wrist to my shoulder is called a gauntlet and it is meant to protect my arm should the pups bite. And they do. A LOT! This is what my arms looked like at the end of five days of shearing...painful! Crew members with more experience usually come away bruise free but that was definitely not the case for me. I'll have to work on that.



And now I head off with Lou and Greg to learn about re-sighting. This is a very important study that has been going on for many years where female pups and adults have tags put on their flippers so that we can track their site fidelity (or likelihood to come back to their place of birth), mothering skills / successful birth rate and age survival.



It's amazing how much information you can get by knowing simply who the individual is based on when and where the tag was first attached. All of this research is done on St. Paul at a location called Polovina Cliffs. The cliffs allow us to observe the animals with minimal disturbance since we are so high above them. There are also blinds built on the cliffs to offer us protection in tough weather. It also gives us a great view of the activity below.

This project has been going on all summer, rain or shine. I had the opportunity to participate for three days and the weather can be daunting but you get caught up in the task at hand and start to forget that your fingers are no longer as mobile as they should be. For 6 to 8 hours the goal is to sight as many flipper tags as you can, note whether or not the female has a pup with her and what the female is or is not doing with that pup. It's kind of like playing a really intense version of Where's Waldo?.

Here, you give it a try. The picture below is a bull male with his harem. In it there is at least one female with a flipper tag. See if you can find any more. For re-sights we have binoculars and a scope but sometimes just using your eyes is the best way to catch a tag. Try it out and see how you do. I'll show you what I found in the next blog. Happy searching!


~Patty

Do you remember when you were little and your parents would tell you to never run with a sharp object in your hand? Well, that rule definitely does not apply during pup shearing on St. Paul! Out here you have a pair of sharp sheep shears strapped to your hip and when a group of pups are gathered together and the signal (it usually looks like that hand gesture from Neo in the Matrix... got the visual?) is given you move as fast as you can over wet, slippery rocks to get to them. The picture below gives you an idea of the topography that we deal with out on the rookeries.

The goal each day is to shear the selected number of pups as quickly and accurately as possible so that we can remove ourselves from the rookery and allow the bull males and their harems to come back up to their territory. So in this situation, running with scissors is recommended (safely, of course). Let me tell you, never before have I felt so uncoordinated! As I try to keep up with everyone else heading to the group of pups there is a constant thought on repeat in my head... stand up, don't fall, stand up, don't fall. I was so grateful to have knee pads on! :)



~Patty