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

side to side on the pup’s body as if it were a pillow. The pups themselves
varied in pugnacity while being weighed and tagged - some fought and bit all
the time; others were quiescent. Two of them went into the water after marking,
although their moult had not yet begun. There was rain, it became very slushy
underfoot and we were soaked to the skin by the time we got back.
Next day the three of us went over to Shag Rock to mark Weddell pups and then
round to the other bays. Derek was bitten in the knee by a large pup and had to
return to base for first aid! Ralph and I carried on. Sadly, one pup whose moult
was almost complete, was very small and grossly deformed; its body was
twisted in the pelvic region and the whole of its hindquarters were paralyzed.
When it moved the hind part of its body was dragged passively, and it was very
small and very thin, with little blubber on it, the muscle contours showing up
through the skin. Its eyes were very bright and the teeth well developed - and it
was very pugnacious. The thin body, long neck and movements accentuated the
usual snake-like appearance. Its mother seemed to be indifferent to its condition.
Off the Northwest shore of the two Oliphant Islets was a dead and almost
drifted-over adult Weddell, with a pup lying beside it. The pup was evidently
about two weeks old when the mother died and had been living on its blubber
reserves since then. It was now very thin indeed, again with unnaturally bright
eyes. There was no visible indication of the cause of the mother’s death, but it
wasn’t possible to see the underside of her body as it was embedded in hard
snow; she seemed to have been in excellent condition when she died. We moved
the pup over to another seal and its pup, so she now had two to suckle.
Next day Ralph and I took a sack of coal (for branding seals) as far as Drying
Point and saw some elephant seal tracks there - a pointer to the imminent start of
the elephants’ breeding season (described in chapter 11). We tagged nineteen
Weddell pups, bringing the total to 54, but I had now run out of monel strips for
making the tags. Most pups were quite large by now and the majority had
completed the moult; they were heavy and difficult to handle. We found another
dead pup with its mother beside it, looking very lethargic and almost dead
herself; no doubt her full breasts were very painful. Two old females were lying
together some distance away from the other seals and when disturbed they
roared, then behaved towards each other as a mother to her pup - nuzzling,
snapping, and rubbing heads on each other’s backs. Presumably their pups had
died, or they had not conceived last season, or were they old and barren?
One mother opened her jaws and went through the ice-scraping motion on the
side of her pup. She repeated this several times and the pup appeared not to
mind, but hair was flying in all directions and it certainly appeared to speed up
the moult! This was the first time I had observed such behaviour and it was
abnormal, possibly due to our presence - an instinctive response to pressure.
Most of the mothers were seen to bite or snap at their pups when we disturbed
them.
I watched a Weddell swimming underwater in its element, through wide tide
cracks, gliding very gracefully and effortlessly by in the crystal-clear green
water. The ice was getting rotten and Ralph got wet falling through one crack.
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