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

attle-scarred males. There appeared to be a large elephant seal in Stygian
Cove, Signy Island.
From the top of Observation Bluff next day, Ralph and I noticed a female
Weddell with two adjacent pups and thought that they might be twins, so we
visited them, but there was no way of knowing. We sexed twelve pups,
obtaining a sex-ratio of 9 female: 3 male; perhaps we were missing some of the
males, whose genital opening is small and harder to see. One adult female was
lying 200 yards to the West of the main group, with plenty of blood on her head
and a trickle of milk from one of her teats. There appeared to be a wound
between her eyes, doubtless inflicted by another female, she appeared exhausted
and paid little interest to us. This cow might have accounted for the extra pup if
she had deserted it, as twins are unusual – reportedly about 1-2%.
I moved three pups away from mothers to test recognition between pup and
mother. One mother took the extra pup as its own, but the others went around
sniffing and nuzzling the pups; they appeared to distinguish alien pups, because
they rejected them, and carried on until they reached their own offspring.
Eventually we replaced the remaining displaced pup beside its mother, who had
taken the extra pup under her wing - or rather flipper. She made off with two
pups following her and didn’t appear to discriminate between them.
One female with a pup was near a breathing-hole and went into the water when
disturbed. She came up again and began to haul out, but slipped back, before
resurfacing. Then she opened her jaws and, went through the ice-rasping
behaviour, swinging her head in an arc of some ten inches, working downwards
rasping with the front teeth of her upper jaw. I was standing less than a foot
from the action and saw the whole process very clearly. The ice was about thirty
inches thick here - between Outer Islet and the shore - and she worked down
rasping the whole of its thickness; the bottom twenty inches or so necessitated
her being under water. Then she hauled out. They do this chiefly by hind-flipper
propulsion, but sometimes use their fore-flippers for traction after the front of
the body emerges. Another female when disturbed buried her head in the snow
and, with her jaws open, began to rasp a roughly circular groove in the manner
described before. Then she gave up and began again at another spot. A further
cow did the same thing and then began to nose around as if looking for a hole.
The former female went down a hole nearby. Was this unfocussed behaviour
inspired rather by the lack of opportunity for easy escape - a displacement
activity under stress - than by protective instinct as regards the pup?
The infants moved mainly with their fore-flippers at right angles to the long axis
of the body - no thrust from the pelvis yet in most of them. But the tracks of
some of the older pups were similar to the adults - the main thrust was from the
pelvis and the abdominal muscles did the work. They had wet circles around
their eyes where the tears flowed. The coat in mid-moult was wiry, the hairs
pulled out easily and its general appearance was like a doormat! The state of the
umbilical cord varied in pups of the same age: in some it had already sloughed
off, while in others it persisted as 3-6 inches of dry, red tissue.
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