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

cutters of 30 to 40 tons that were built in South Georgia from imported materials. The
sealers returned periodically with loads of skins and blubber to the parent vessel, but
in the more inaccessible bays they remained ashore and lived in rough huts,
sometimes throughout the winter. The try-pots of those parties can still be seen in
various parts of the island. We know from accounts of sealing in other areas that
clubs were used to kill the young, and the older seals were lanced. Old bulls were
killed by firing a musket ball upwards through the palate into the brain. The blubber
was flensed off with the hide, and cut into several strips, which were left to soak in
seawater for 24 hrs., which removed the blood. The strips were then cut into small
pieces and boiled in cast iron try-pots, which were mounted on bricks. Often penguin
skins were used to feed the fire. The pots were arranged in a series, and the oil was
run into a second pot after the first boiling, boiled once or twice more, and then run
off into casks. Alternatively the blubber was tried out aboard the parent vessel.
It proved a lucrative employment, but the sealers killed indiscriminately all the
seals they found and the beaches were soon depopulated. In the early days southern
fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) were taken as well as the elephant seals, but the fur
seals were quickly exterminated owing to their greater value and by 1822 were
virtually extinct. That industry reached a peak early in the nineteenth century, but
the decline in the numbers of elephant seals was less dramatic because the value of
the product in proportion to the effort expended, was much less. However, the stock
of elephant seals was so depleted that after 1865 few ships visited the island and by
1880 it had become unprofitable to hunt them. South Georgia was then deserted until
the turn of the century, when the species was found to have increased to numbers,
which made hunting profitable again. The Falkland Islands Government enacted a
Seal Fishery ordinance in 1899, the first step in conservation and management of the
species.
The basis of rational exploitation. The biological basis of rational exploitation should be
apparent from the biology of the animal (described in chapter 17). It is highly
polygynous, a single male being able to serve a large number of cows (We know
from this species and the northern elephant seal, that a few of the males on a beach
may father the great majority of the pups). As the sexes are nearly equal in numbers
at birth a large surplus of males can therefore be harvested without affecting the
reproductive potential of the herd. A related characteristic, which makes the species
ideal for exploitation in this way is the enormous sexual disparity in size, a large
adult male weighing around eight times the size of the average adult female. The
industry has been based on the oil yield from the blubber was available in large
units, so it was most advantageous to take the older males and this could best be
done during the breeding season. Because the largest males tend to haul out first on
the beaches the sealers automatically selected the most productive animals. This did
not apply to autumn sealing, which ended in 1954.
Clearly, it would have been quite irrational to attempt to exploit the females in a
sustained yield operation, although the early sealers didn’t discriminate in this way.
Nor would it be right to take pups although it has been proposed - if only on
practical grounds, and in theory, as disproved below. For it would directly interfere
with recruitment to the herd. Also such catches would have to be made in the
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