Winter Over 2016 Blog #3

Yes, as promised the fauna blog. Lionel (the Adelie penguin) is stamping his feet in anticipation.

Weddell Seal

On arrival at Scott Base the frozen sea surrounding was dotted with black spots. These on closer inspection turned out to be Weddell seals lying around like corpulent slugs.

The corpulent slug look                                                

While the sea ice was still stable I ventured out along what is called a pressure ridge – where the sea ice is fractured and pushes up. This appears to be a favoured spot for the seals as they prefer to lie on sea ice that is attached to the land rather than icebergs. And imagine that the contour of the pushed up ice gives them shelter from winds and lots of little weak spots for them to create holes in the ice so they can pop down and get dinner.

The watering holes                                                                         

The refreshing dip

The walk along the pressure ridges is marked with red and green flags on bamboo poles. The intention is that you need to stay within 5m or so of these flags which mark a safe checked route, but you need also to keep 10m away from the seals. The dilemma comes when a seal is lying against the flag. But it does afford great photo opportunities and time to observe the interaction of the seals with each other. Especially around the access holes through the ice, some of these guys are definitely the bullies.

Coming out of sea ice hole

But generally they remind me of Garfield the cat or the Chestershire cat in their facial expressions.

Disturbing the morning slumbers------the not amused look.

On investigation (aka Google) it appears that they can hold their breath for up to 80mins. Among other adaptations they have ability to prevent lactic acid from entering the blood stream during dives but they need to process this out of their system while on land – so not surprisingly must be totally knackered after their hunt for dinner. Dinner is around 10kg of seafood – if you don’t move around much and up to 50kg if you are a seal with ADHD.

The Skua

Like a seagull and suspect that there would have been heaps of them in the days of rubbish dumps and when humans had huskies down here and fed them seal meat. But today the pickings are slim and suspect they would not vote for recycling.

The take off  ---------------------------------------------and the inspection hover over

I did try and have a conversation with one of them, but suspect he must have come from the McMurdo side of the hill as he seemed puzzled by the Kiwi accent.

Eh? ---Only speak American

Family day at the beach

They are opportunists and have this knack of hovering directly over you just in-case you have bought something edible outside. But Keas would beat them as far as brains, cheek and destruction is concerned.

The Adelie

Well to date I have only seen “Lionel” at McMurdo alone and looking a bit lost and bewildered. Like he’d got on the wrong train (or ice flow) and hanging around for his mates to turn up. Apparently these little guys that hang around the Ross Sea area down here regularly migrate up to 13,000 kms during the year following the sun from breeding colonies to winter feeding grounds. The ultimate sun worshipers, should put him in touch with some of the gold coast migratory Kiwis who appear to have much the same yearly migratory pattern.

Lionel waiting for his mates

Sea break out- before continuing with the tale of fauna from Ross Island will need to make a diversion to mention the sea ice. This has gone from solid ice out on the foreshore when I arrived in February to small cracks starting to show and then around 8am on 29 February the whole sea ice disappeared in a period of under 4hrs. It was like someone unplugging a sink and tonnes of ice swept by and out of the bay leaving mainly just sea with occasional iceberg floating by.

-----------------------------------------going ------------------------------------gone

11am

11.30am

2.20 pm

And with the opening of the sea came the sea based visitors. With emperor penguins, Orca, minke whales and more.

The Emperor Penguins

The occasional emperor or two had been seen in the distance on the sea ice. Two of these were making for the airfield then as they observed the flight taking off appeared to have a “domestic” aka “I thought you had checked the departure time or did you bring the tickets” after which hubby(?) got a stern peck and proceeded to walk off in a tangent from the other.

Pre and post domestic

When they walk they shuffle like bored teenage boys with low rider jeans. I am sure that if I can match video clips of Emperors and the bored teenage boy walk there would be a remarkable resemblance.

With the ice flows came a group?, pod?, flock? Maybe should call them “a regency” of 22 Emperor penguins taking turns at climbing on ice flows and diving off then resurfacing and jet propelling themselves back onto the ice flow.

An “emporia” of emperors                                                       

Last sighted taking an iceberg out to sea with resident seal.

As the ice flow headed past Scott Base heading out to sea with all 22 Emperors and one Weddell seal on board it reminded me of the cartoon penguins in the film Madagascar. I am sure I could hear them discussing who was in charge of navigation and whether the seal was passenger or crew.

PS.  these guys stand around a bit over a metre high and around the 30kg mark (give or take a fish or 2), they can dive to 550m down and hold their breath for over 20mins. So no wonder you spend a long time waiting for them to surface.

The whales

We did briefly see a couple Minke whales which appear to be much more subdued than other whales Ive seen. According to the books most of the minkes seen in the Ross Sea are pregnant females so perhaps subdued is good.

Minke I believe

A small pod of Orca also did do a cruise by just after the sea ice had departed. And finally the Polar Bear (no only kidding!), the leopard seal (no, just kidding again!) though I hear from DOC  in Warkworth there has been a leopard seal hanging around north Auckland coast for past 6 months , last seen around Leigh. So if you’re in the vicinity let him/her know that Antarctica NZ has several flights going south to Antarctica over winter.

But some of the Scott Base team did see a pod of Beaked whales swim and do some aerials.  Well they didn’t know they were a rare event until the photographic evidence was sent to marine mammal expert who identified them as Arnoux beaked whales. As these are not commonly seen apparently generated some excitement amongst the whalers (whale research people). Unfortunately I missed this whole episode but have added a picture taken by Andy Waters of one of these guys leaping.

Beaked whale pic by Andy Waters (8/3/16)

Well that is it for this blog. Just started doing Antarctica on line course via Victoria University so maybe as the first module is on exploration will do some checking out of the local historic huts for the next blog.

This is what Silvester the seal thinks of Blog no 4 proposed subject matter