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

At that time FIDS had no future jobs to offer and I had been looking around.
During 1953 I was offered a job at the Fishery Research Station in St. John’s,
Newfoundland. It offered the prospect of continuing research on seals – mainly
the Arctic harp seal and perhaps other species including hooded seal By now
Maureen and I were engaged and discussed it at length, but decided not to take it
up. Meanwhile my achievements over my years in FIDS, were well known to the
FIDS Scientific Committee and people on that Committee like Colin Bertram and
Brian Roberts and of course Bunny were thinking about my future. As it
happened Dr Neill Mackintosh who had done classic studies on the large whales
from South Georgia (where I had lived and worked in the former laboratories of
Discovery Investigations) and who was now Deputy Director of the National
Institute of Oceanography (NIO), was a member of this committee. He offered me
a permanent appointment at the NIO in the small group of three comprising the
Whale Biology Section. The laboratories were located at Wormley in Surrey and
the starting salary was reasonable, though not munificent. Maureen and I
discussed this prospect in depth. I had no doubt that I could obtain an academic
research post elsewhere, perhaps in Cambridge, where I was known. But whale
research sounded interesting and had a practical purpose – to work much as I
had done on seals - towards understanding of the biology of the larger whales
and to contribute to their sustainable management and conservation. It would
also be my first permanent and pensionable job. We decided that I should take up
this appointment as a Senior Scientific Officer at the NIO and this meant that I
would be part of the Royal Navy Scientific Service.
However, at least nine tenths of the life of a large whale is spent under the
surface in the vast remote reaches of the world’s oceans. It was not then possible
to study their population ecology by direct observation, but there were three
main ways of studying their biology indirectly. First, inferences about their
distribution, and abundance could be made from sightings of their conspicuous
blows at the surface. Secondly, by firing whale tags into their blubber, hoping
they would be recovered when the whales were killed by whalers other
inferences could be drawn - about their migrations between the Antarctic feeding
grounds in summer and breeding areas in winter, and perhaps over time about
their age and abundance. Thirdly, the most promising method, the basis of
Mackintosh’s classic studies with Wheeler in the 1920s and 1930s, was to examine
the carcasses of whales killed in the whaling industry – on shore stations or in
pelagic whaling factories on the high seas. The observations and measurements
of the dead whales, and collection of organs for subsequent study of feeding,
growth, reproduction and age was the primary source of information, and was to
provide validation for later non-invasive research methods. I had gained much
experience of this approach in my elephant seal research and had seen whales
being processed at the whaling stations on South Georgia.
Such material could best be obtained by joining a commercial expedition
where a fleet of whale catchers caught whales of several species and delivered
them to a mother ship – a floating factory – for ‘rendering’ to oil, bone meal and
meat meal, frozen meat and other so-called ‘by-products’ such as meat extract.
The floating factories were just that – each a complicated processing factory,
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