Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

number of Weddells, mostly pregnant females, but including some fighting
males. One elephant seal was seen hauled out at Cape Vik
A few days later in nasty weather, I shot a Weddell seal in the morning and did a
post-mortem. Unfortunately the bullet hit the skull and shattered it. The animal
was 106 inches long. The stomach contained about 4 pounds of stones and
gravel, a cephalopod beak and fish eye-lenses. There was a very dense nematode
population in the stomach - like a pile carpet. The left horn of the uterus
contained a male foetus (49 inches long and weight 52 pounds), which I extracted
and injected for preservation with Ottaway’s solution (an embalming fluid). The
teeth of the foetus had not yet pierced the gums but the nails were well-formed
on both fore- and hind-flippers. I collected claws from the hind-flippers for
possible use in age determination. (Many years later Don Siniff took this further
and published a method, but it is only useful for the first few year groups). Thick
fur covered its body, tinged grey-green by the amniotic fluid. The muscles were
very flaccid and poorly developed and the blubber layer only 1 4 inch thick at
maximum.
The Weddell seals’ pupping season. Increasing numbers of Weddells began to haul
out now. By the middle of August there were four to the North of Port Jebsen
and two were at the ice-edge off Gourlay; a male Weddell lay off Billie Rocks.
Each day over the next week we saw one to seven Weddells in Borge Bay. When,
exploring, we crossed the strait on 23 August I watched a Weddell coming up to
breathe off Cape Hansen and photographed a very small new breathing-hole in a
tide-crack, about 3 inches across. Several other breathing-holes in the tide-cracks
round the floes had been snowed-over and blocked save for a tiny opening, with
delicate rime crystals from the seals’ breath They were ‘knocking’ under the ice -
a noise similar to the hammering of domestic water pipes under pressure when
air gets in. The Weddells made this noise with their mouths closed, only the
larynx moving and did so both in and out of the water. Under water the noise
seemed to be amplified. When we camped on the ice during our winter journeys
we also heard a variety of sounds coming up through the ice. (whistles, chirps,
glottal sounds)
Ralph made an ice observation from the Bluff and reported an elephant seal -
identified by the noise it made - and 24 Weddell seals; he thought that one lying
out near Gourlay Point had pupped. Then, on 24 August he reported a definite
pup sighting of a Weddell off Gourlay Point and one other Weddell lying
nearby. So the first birth was probably about 23 August or the evening of the
22 nd . This assumes that seals off our Northwest coast were at the same stage -
likely since I had seen no pups the previous day from the top of Cape Hansen.
No other seals were hauled out. Next day Ralph and I skied over to look at the
Weddells off Gourlay Point - down to Elephant Flats, up Moraine Valley and
through the ablation channel. We had a good run down to the beach and over
the sea ice, to where the seals were hauled out near the edge of the fast-ice.
There were two pups and the mother of one of them was quite fierce. They were
delightful cuddly creatures with large liquid brown eyes, and covered in long
golden fur. One was probably in its second day, the other about three days old.
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