A leakage of nearby

On the Beeb

2007-11-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

BBC Radio 4 ran a two-part programme on whaling. I get to chat a little in the second part, from Monday 26th.

Link is here
There is no more of this one

A little about me....................

2007-11-19T15:30:00.000-05:00

In 1989, I was awarded my PhD on the behaviour and ecology of bottlenose and humpback dolphins in Moreton Bay, off Brisbane, making me the first Australian to get a PhD by studying living cetaceans. By then, I'd already started on my next project, assessing the effects of the then-new whale watching industry in Hervey Bay. That work provided the primary scientific input for establishing the Hervey Bay Marine Park, the first marine park established to manage commercial whale watching.

The dolphins I studied in my Ph.D. work were affected by fisheries. Trying to understand how we humans affect marine mammals, and helping to mitigate problems that are identified through research, has been the focus of my work since then. While in Australia I worked on humpback and right whales; dugongs; snubfin, humpback and bottlenose dolphins. The work took me from islands a few miles from Papua New Guinea to the desert by the sea at the Head of the Great Australian Bight, and to the edge of the Antarctic pack ice.

But I ended up in a strange employment situation – acting as a tenured faculty member at a University, but employed on short-term teaching contracts. Something had to give. My wife won a great postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, and a job came up for a population ecologist to work on seals at another research group in the same town – the choice was clear.

Given Norwegians' fame as marine mammal hunters, this probably seems like a strange move, but I'd worked with Aboriginal people hunting dugongs in northern Australia, so I was under the impression that the job in Norway would involve something similar – using science to work towards ensuring that hunts were sustainable. To my shock, I found myself in a research group where the main interest seemed to be providing scientific backing to the idea that marine mammals should be culled in the name of “Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management”. This site has stories of my time working in that group – so far, on a survey of harp seals, and a “lethal sampling” trip to the ice of east Greenland.

In early 2004, the Norwegian parliament instituted a new policy on managing marine mammals, giving official approval to the idea that ecosystem management is all about culling. I refused as a matter of principle to work on research that would support the policy, and so had no option other than to resign my Principal Scientist job.

We moved to the USA in mid-2004. I've discovered just how costly it is to resign over a matter of principle. Not recommended as a Good Career Move.

For a sense of my academic work, here are some (relatively) recent papers from my areas of interest. I have most of these as pdfs, so if you want one, just shoot me an email:

Marine mammals and “Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management”:

Corkeron, P. J. 2006. Opposing views of the “ecosystem approach” to fisheries management. Conservation Biology 20: 617-619.

Corkeron, P.J. 2004. Fishery Management and Culling. Science. 306:1891.

Whale watching, sustainability and what whales mean to us:

Corkeron, P.J. 2006. How shall we watch whales? pp 161-170 in D.M. Lavigne (ed). Wildlife Conservation in Pursuit of Ecological Sustainability. Proceedings of an International Forum. The International Fund for Animal Welfare, Guelph, Canada and the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

Corkeron, P.J. 2004. Whalewatching, iconography and marine conservation. Conservation Biology. 18: 847-849.

Marine mammals of tropical coasts – conservation biology:

Parra, G.J., Corkeron, P.J. and Marsh H. 2006. Population sizes, site fidelity and residence patterns of Australian snubfin and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins: implications for conservation. Biological Conservation 129: 167-180.

Parra, G.J., Schick, R., and Corkeron, P.J. 2006. Spatial distribution and environmental correlates of Australian snubfin and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. Ecography 29: 1-11.

Chilvers, B.L. Corkeron, P.J. and Puotinin, M.L. 2003. The influence of trawling on the behaviour and spatial distribution of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus, in Moreton Bay, Australia. Canadian Journal of Zoology. 81: 1947-1955.

Chilvers, B.L. and Corkeron, P.J. 2003. Abundance of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins Tursiops aduncus, off Point Lookout, Australia. Marine Mammal Science. 19: 85-95

Chilvers, B.L. and Corkeron P.J. 2001. Trawling and bottlenose dolphins' social structure. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. 268:1901-1906.

Marsh H., Eros C., Corkeron P.J. and Breen B. 1999. A conservation strategy for dugongs: implications of Australian research. Marine and Freshwater Research 50:979-990.

Marine mammal acoustics

Risch, D., Clark, C.W., Corkeron, P.J., Elepfandt, A., Kovacs, K.M., Lydersen, C., Stirling, I. and Van Parijs, S.M. 2007. Vocalizations of male bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus) classification and geographical variation. Animal Behaviour. 73:747-762.

Van Opzeeland, I.C., Corkeron, P.J. Leyssen, T., Simila,T., and Van Parijs, S.M. 2005. Acoustic behaviour of Norwegian killer whales, Orcinus orca during carousel and seiner foraging on spring-spawning herring. Aquatic Mammals 31:110-119.

Van Parijs, S.M., Corkeron, P.J., Harvey, J., Hayes, S., Mellinger, D., Rouget, P., Thompson, P.M. Wahlberg, M. and Kovacs, K.M. 2003. Regional patterns in vocalizations of male harbor seals. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 113: 3403-3410.

Van Parijs S.M., Smith, J. and Corkeron. P.J. 2002. Using calls to estimate the abundance of inshore dolphins; a case study with Pacific humpback dolphins, Sousa chinensis. Journal of Applied Ecology. 39: 853-864.

Van Parijs S. and Corkeron P.J. 2001 Boat traffic affects the acoustic behaviour of Pacific humpback dolphins Sousa chinensis. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. 81: 533-538.

Van Parijs S. and Corkeron P.J. 2001. Vocalisations and behaviour of Pacific humpback dolphins, Sousa chinensis. Ethology. 107: 701-716.

Seal stomachs VII: Aftermath

2007-11-19T13:36:00.001-05:00

This set of posts starts here.

Once back in Tromsø, the rest of the work started. Jaws boiled in a large pot, stench-stew in a small room with its own air supply. The teeth softened from boiling, I wrenched them from jaws, cut them with a tiny bandsaw, fixed them in epoxy to microscope slides. Then I counted the rings in teeth – rather like tree-rings – telling me how old the seals were when they died.

Lotta saw to the stomachs and intestines - thawing, washing, sieving to sort contents. Dried earbones from fish, checked and measured under a microscope for species identification. Squid beaks.

Seals can live long - harps and hoods into their thirties. The youngest harp seals reach sexual maturity at four, some female hoods mature at three. Given what's known about other, better studied, seal populations with similar life histories, about a quarter of the harps and hoods in the West Ice population should have been immature.

Of 127 seals killed on the expedition, the ages of 119 were determined from their teeth. Over two-thirds were immature (and of those, 63 were yearlings). The eight animals that weren't aged from their teeth were, judged by their weight, immature as well. We had killed too many young seals, and not enough older seals, while out on the ice. And – obviously - there was nothing that could be done to remedy the bias in age classes once we were back.

Tore wanted to use the data to make inferences on the diet of harp and hooded seals in winter, and whether the diets of the two species overlapped. What he ended up with was data that could tell him a little about the diet of very young individuals of both species, and not a lot more.

Seal stomachs VI: Seal kill

2007-11-19T13:31:00.000-05:00

This set of posts starts here

Back into the pack ice, and another day of searching. Tore and I were on the bridge together, so I grabbed the opportunity to quiz him about the project.

“So Tore, aren't you worried about being further south than you'd intended?”

“No, I think we'll find seals here”.

“But – don't you want to get seals from the same area each year?”.

“Not really – they move north after pupping, so next year we'll be working further north anyway”.

I was getting to one of my bigger concerns.

“Hmm. Now, this project – you're looking at seasonal variation in seal diet. And you're taking them in late winter this year, summer last year, and late autumn next year, yeah?”

“Yes.”, said Tore, looking at me.

“So your data'll be temporally confounded.”.

Tore just looked at me.

“Okay,”, I said, “You get samples in winter one year, summer another, autumn another – how do you know that any differences you find will be due to the seasons, and not because something's varied between the years?”.

“But that's not a real problem.”

“How do you know? How can you tell, from this design?”

Tore just looked at me a little more, shook his head, resumed scanning for seals.

The first animal, late in the evening - we'd moved south far enough to experience a noticeable difference in time of sunset – was another grise. She was followed by three adults in quick succession, then another two youngsters. By then, it was after seven, too dark for Kjell and Bjørn to continue shooting. And it seemed that Tore had found himself a patch of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of seals.

The next morning, and I was back on the bridge, watching. Only by now, when I'd see a young seal, I'd say nothing. I wouldn't even keep my binoculars on it, in case I alerted anyone else to its presence. We'd killed nineteen animals - all hooded seals - but only a third of them had been definitely mature. At the rate we were going, the only thing that Tore would have was information on what immature hooded seals ate. I had enough problems with the whole expedition without adding an extra layer of uselessness to it.

I also had trouble with the idea that if I observed an animal, I was condemning it to death. It rather took the thrill out of observation. So I stayed on the bridge for a while, kept looking, ignoring the seals I saw. The haphazard nature of Tore's watch system paid off for the seals – I'd got my eye in, and noticed a few before the call came – someone else had seen one.

At least the ice was always beautiful. Once I saw a gyrfalcon, the pure white falcon of the Arctic. It watched us, haughty, from meagre vantages of floes, then soared away.

But I didn't see much ice for the next three days. One dead seal followed another for two days - 26, then 30 each day. By the end of both days, I needed Jan Mayen's spotlights to see what I was doing on deck.

A telling incident amid the splatter. The corpse of another pregnant female hooded seal disgorged a live pup, bleating across the deck. The crewman who'd killed the last pup clubbed this one too. Lotta was off delivering seal body parts to Tore, and so didn't see it. After he'd clubbed the pup, I looked at the crewman, shook my head, said “Et lieveling.”, just as he had before. He looked down at me, snorted, walked off. As I thought. Nothing like showing off a soft side – whether it's there or not - to impress a possibly-available woman.

And then our big day – three seals in the morning, 44 in the afternoon. The day I crushed the wounded female's skull with the sledgehammer. By evening, a dozen seals were still lined up under the glare of the deck spots for me to dissect. Kjell came to help with the dissections – it was too dark to shoot. He could skin a seal in half the time it took me.

All around me there was jubilation. Kjell and I were still working, slicing and hacking at the seal carcasses, Lotta disposing of pieces into plastic bags as needed. Tore decided it was time to celebrate, cracked open beers for everyone. Only I refused. The deck was slippery, my knife was – as always – razor sharp, and a mistake amid the bacterial soup of the dead seals didn't bear thinking about. Too dangerous for my liking.

Besides, I saw nothing to celebrate.

Once the last carcass skinned and eviscerated, chunks of gut safely stored in their plastic bags, I wiped my hands, cracked open a can of beer. After four days spent mostly bent over, manhandling, lugging over a hundred lumps of flesh weighing up to five hundred pounds, my back was beginning to ache. I'd had enough of the gore.

Next morning, when it looked like another day of killing, I had Julie find me some painkillers, spent the day reading. As it happened, only five animals were shot that day. We'd left the huge group of seals, and were heading for home. Tore was satisfied.

Continued here

Seal stomachs V: How do we know what seals eat?

2007-11-19T13:25:00.000-05:00

This set of posts starts here.

Stomach contents are to diet as weather is to climate. At its simplest, the accumulation of records of the weather each day – the temperature, how much rain falls - allows us to build up a picture of the climate for a particular place over time. So it is with animals' diets – if we could watch every meal that every individual of a species or population ate, then, by accumulating records of their meals, we'd have perfect knowledge of their diet. For marine mammals is this obviously impossible – unless our population of interest are all kept in captivity.

So. How do we know what seals eat? The most intuitively obvious answer would be to watch seals feeding. Then we'd know what they ate, because we'd see it happening. Logistically impossible, although technology offers hope. So. We can either find ways of looking at what our animals have ingested, or we can look at where they've gone to feed and work out what's there, or some mix of both of these. And we can do this in ways of varying sophistication.

What do seals ingest?

We can look at the contents of their stomach for recent meals; or in their intestines for slightly older material; or at their faeces, for what was in their intestine without actually handling the seals. Intestinal contents can be obtained without killing seals - they discover the joys of involuntary enemas. For seals that haul out on ice, faecal sampling presents problems that are seen as insurmountable. Enemas on ice are difficult, but not completely impossible.

And what do we do once we've removed the gut contents? There can be whole fish or squid in a stomach, or just remnant hard parts – the ear bones, backbones or ribs of fish; the beaks of squid. By sorting and measuring these back in a lab, and with access to a suitable reference collection - bones and beaks of likely prey, including examples of different sizes of the same species - we can tell what species the seal ate, and what size the prey were. Whole prey items from a stomach are easy: we can simply count, measure and weigh them. But what of hard parts? How do we allow for changes to those that we find – different bits erode in their own ways. And what do we do with hard bits that we can't identify to species, but to some higher taxon (cod-like fishes, for instance)? One way around this is to analyse the DNA of all gut contents, or of problematic goop. These analyses can be reliable and precise, but they're always time-consuming and expensive.

Or we can turn to chemistry for evidence. Chemically, seals are what they eat. Tell-tale fatty acids, absorbed from fish, shellfish, squid - or whatever else that seals might eat - turn up in seals' blubber. The chemical composition of these fatty acids, extracted from blubber samples, can, using sophisticated data-mining algorithms, be compared with the chemical composition of likely prey items. We were collecting blubber samples for Tore's colleague at the Polar Institute who did exactly this. All that's needed is a plug of blubber from the seals, and representative samples of possible prey species for the chemical analysis. And a chemistry lab and a good statistician.

Another chemical option involves comparing the relative composition of isotopes of important elements – primarily carbon and nitrogen – with representative samples from putative prey. Patterns in isotope composition provide information analogous to that from fatty acids, and can be obtained from old bones, as well as from fresh chunks of animal (skin, hair, teeth, internal organs, whatever).

Chemistry smears data over time. It offers panorama, but sacrifices detail. Stable isotopes provide insight into what an animal has been eating for months or longer, and fatty acids for weeks or months, depending on how the species under study lays down fat. But this longer perspective must have a price – it's harder to tell exactly what species has been eaten.

So it would appear that gut sampling is the best option. But detail also has its price. Fresh, just eaten food in a stomach is easy to identify. But what of animals with nothing in their stomach? What are they telling the researcher, other than that a lot of animals must die to provide data? More problematically, what about the half-digested gunk that's usually there as well? Squid beaks are chemically nothing like the hard parts of fish, and seals' stomach acids digest beaks much more slowly. How do we account for this?

Answering these questions requires addressing a far more basic one – why are the data being collected at all? Why do we care what seals eat? After all, tootling around the Arctic in an ice-strengthened research trawler doesn't come cheap. We were supposed to be addressing two questions about the foraging ecology of harp and hooded seals: how did each species' diet vary over the course of a year, and was there dietary overlap between the two species?

The question that goes begging here is – why ask these particular questions?

Because an animal's diet is the food its eats over time, the chemistry-based approaches (fatty acids and isotopes) offer the advantage of having time resolved, sacrificing detail to do so. But what of gut contents? At best, intestinal or faecal sampling provide data on meals over the past few days. So how can we make inferences about feeding over time - diet - from meals - snapshots in time?

Drawing inference from field data preoccupies ecologists. Sampling theory – how can we infer population-level conclusions from a set of field samples – drives the design of our protocols for data collection. How can we ensure, to the best of our ability, that our samples will allow us to come to unbiased conclusions about the populations of interest? It's here that a couple of key concepts come into play.

Randomization is vital. To a scientist, random means something special, something different from haphazard. In normal usage, the two are interchangeable. In scientific sampling, they are worlds apart. Random sampling is like a lotto draw – each sample has the same probability of selection. Haphazard sampling is when no thought is given to the probability of selecting a sample. Bias – the bane of being able to make inference from data – will almost certainly result from haphazard sampling, and what's worse, even if there is no bias, no-one can ever know.

Pseudoreplication is another key concept. Now that computer programs handle the grunt work of statistical analyses, there's a presumption that ecologists will collect a lot of samples of their data. These samples are supposed to be independent, otherwise they provide another source of bias when it's time to make inferences. Pseudoreplication involves collecting samples that aren't truly independent for the inferences made in the study. Like beauty or pornography, pseudoreplication can be in the eye of the beholder. Are the inferences that we make from our data appropriate? An example from the world of marine mammal stomach contents offers clarification.

A Norwegian government scientist goes into the North Sea on a whaling ship. The whalers kill a dozen or so minke whales, and the scientist checks the whales' stomachs to see what they've been eating. The whalers are interested in killing their quota of whales as quickly as possible (they're out there earning a living, after all), and find many whales in one discrete area. Most of their quota of a dozen are killed in this one spot, a few square miles across. The whales' stomachs are full of sand eels, a small fish that occurs in huge, discrete aggregations.

What inference can the scientist draw from these data? That working from a commercial vessel provides data that can be biased, because commercial considerations override a scientist's desire for randomization? Sure, and rightly so. That a large aggregation of sand eels can attract minke whales, that will feed on them? Not entirely unreasonable. What about – most minke whales in the North Sea eat sand eels? Absolutely not.

That final inference must be based on a few assumptions. The most important is that the whales killed were a representative sample of all minke whales in the North Sea. But we know - from surveys in the North Sea, and from other information on the biology of minke whales – that minkes occur elsewhere, not just in that one specific area where there happened to be a lot of sand eels. The assumption that the stomachs were a representative sample is what's known as a strong assumption – an assumption which, if it's wrong, causes everything about the study to fall apart and leaves the scientist looking like a bit of a goose.

This example – with the inference drawn that sand eels are the main food of minke whales in the North Sea – was published in a scientific journal a few years ago. The author treated each stomach as an independent sample, in order to make his inference about the whole of the North Sea. But most of the whales that were killed had aggregated to feed on the same thing (sand eels), which is why there were where they were, and so available for killing and having their stomachs investigated. So his samples weren't independent samples. Hence the term, pseudoreplicates.

Place matters, particularly when studying marine mammals that can move through entire ocean basins. So what about looking at where marine mammals feed? These days, SLTDRs are tool of choice for seals that probably can't be handled twice (like harps and hoods). There are other options for seals whose behaviour makes it likely that they can be found again – ones that return regularly to a haulout site accessible to scientists. The coolest toys for the well-heeled scientist in this situation are tiny video cameras that store digital imagery, instead of storing depth data. So finally, we can watch how seals feed. But as we can't ever be sure of re-catching a harp or hood, this isn't an option with them. SLTDRs (Satellite-Linked Time-Depth Recorders, remember?) are used, but they're kissed goodbye once they've been attached.

After our day ashore, Tore had his permission to hunt in Icelandic waters. So we all made our way back to the Jan Mayen, the ship cast off, and we steamed into Denmark Strait. Thanks to the accident while at Jan Mayen (the island), we were about to hunt seals in an area well south of where we intended to originally.

Continued here

Seal stomachs IV: Grise

2007-10-16T14:23:00.000-04:00

This set of posts starts here

The last carcass of the day had been a young hood, a blueback. Norwegian sealers call them grise, which translates, literally, to pigs. I have no idea why. Their backs are dark bluish, bellies off-cream. Giant deep-black eyes over a stubby, rounded muzzle set with a frizz of whiskers. They must be a strong competitor for the prettiest animal in the known universe.

Jan Mayen was trudging through ice, just in from the edge of the pack. I was on the bridge with Tore and a couple of other scientists, watching. After the first five hoods, a day of nothing. The following afternoon, and a crewman spotted a seal. I swung my binoculars, finally got to see one on the ice. Okay - so that's what I'm looking for. Another grise. Kjell and Bjørn hurried across the foredeck, into their shelter on the bow, rifle cases in hand. I headed down to the trawl deck. Time for another dissection. It was the only one for the day.

The next day saw another seven seals shot, all juvenile hoods. I'd got the hang of the dissections, they were becoming repetitive. At least small animals were easy to roll. They were all immature, which made finding their gonads tricky, but Lotta and I had developed a routine.

Once I'd got the basics of dissection resolved, other scientists could join in. One of Tore's most attractive traits was the way he'd invite scientific hitch-hikers along on his expeditions. This cruise was actually a joint operation, and we were sharing vessel time with some fish biologists – geneticists and physiologists – from the Norwegian College of Fisheries Science, based at Tromsø's university. And Tore had let some other scientists tag along, too.

There was Jo, a student at Tromsø university, doing his PhD on the thermal physiology of marine mammals. He was collecting squares of seals' blubber and hide, to take back to the lab, to test how well they conducted heat. His work was easy – once I'd measured a seal, he'd step in, slice off a large square from its back and take it off for storage.

Our other hitch-hiker was Jørgen, the professor of anatomy from the University of Copenhagen – a small, solid, happy man, who wanted a couple of different things. He collected seals' arm bones - once I'd cut the foreflippers off, he'd whittle flesh off them. He wanted to see how seals' bone density changed over the seasons. His other project involved collecting blood from seals' hearts as soon as possible after death (for reasons that I never fully understood). So as soon as I'd finished skinning, he'd race over with some vials, I'd slice into the seal's heart with a scalpel and he'd collect the blood. Another Dane – Jørn – was along too, as Jørgen's offsider.

Jørgen taught human anatomy to medical students, and towards the end of the day, he was deep in conversation with Julie, the nurse we'd picked up from Jan Mayen (the island), and with the crewman who'd handled the Zodiac for the changeover. We soon found out why. Over dinner, Tore announced that we had to make another detour – to northern Iceland. The crewman had broken his foot while keeping the Zodiac and Jan Mayen's hull separate, on one of their more extreme swing-meetings. Jørgen and Julie couldn't set his foot with the first aid gear available on the boat, so we were off to the nearest hospital – in Akureyri, in northern Iceland, a day and a half's steam to our south.

More time for me to slog through MatLab code.

Two dawns later, I was on the bridge, watching the mountains looming over Eyjafjord as we approached Akureyri. The scenery could have been northern Norway – small wooden farmhouses , racks for drying fish, barren mountains. A small, funky, prosperous-looking town, Although only 16,500 people, Akureyri's the largest settlement in northern Iceland, so it has all the trimmings of a city - international airport, university, cafés – and a hospital. An ambulance took the crewman away, and we had the rest of the day off.

We'd come so far south that Tore decided our best option for finding seals was in Denmark Strait, the water and ice between north-western Iceland and south-eastern Greenland. Tore had some calls to make - permissions to kill seals in Icelandic territory - so we had the day to wander town. I headed out with Jim and Kim, the fish physiologists who shared the cabin next to mine.

Jim was a postdoc, British, dark Celt. He was working on contract at an American university, deep in the midwest. As we walked, he told stories of his bemusement at the culture of there – of watching farming families at local diners, holding hands, heads down, praying aloud before eating. A different world from his childhood among the uprooted Irish of Liverpool.

Kim was Danish, eversmiling, bright red hair, freckles. He was Jim's offsider, recently finished his undergraduate degree, and along for some more Arctic experience. He'd brought his fishing rod, and wet a line off Jan Mayen's stern whenever he had the chance. Sometimes he even caught something, but if he didn't, he didn't care. For him, fishing was part of being by the water.

And so we wandered around Akureyri, stretching our legs. One shop with a Billabong surfwear sticker in the window. Scandinavian abstract sculpture on the street. Coffee. Different food. Scandinavian, but different. The joy of walking more than twenty metres in one direction.

Time to reflect. I was thinking about what we were doing.

Continued here

Seal stomachs III: Into the ice

2007-10-16T13:54:00.000-04:00

This post starts here

The bad weather blew itself out quickly, and next morning we steamed off. A days' sail and we were approaching the pack ice edge. The swells eased, smoothing the ship's motion. It was time to build the shooting station.

Lethal sampling animals is the euphemism of choice for killing. Kjell and Bjørn - a different Bjørn, the scientific diver for the local University - were responsible for shooting seals on this trip. But the bow of a ship crunching through pack ice is a rather cold and unpleasant place, and the shooters have to stay there all through the daylight hours. Into the ice

A few days before we'd gone to sea, I'd driven down to the docks, to the local University's storage shed, with Nils Eric, Kjell and Bjørn (the diver). We'd checked that several wooden boards clamped together properly, making a small shed. Now I understood why. We were in the ice, so there was little risk that huge seas might destroy the shooting shelter. We walked to the bow, helped Bjørn and Kjell clamp, then nail, the boards together. Kjell and Bjørn had a shelter from which they could shoot.

All we needed were animals.

We were into the edge of the pack ice, surveying for seals. Something strange happened. More to the point, something normal didn't happen. When surveying for marine mammals, I've always worked a roster of watches - usually two or three hours on, and a couple of hours off. But Tore didn't organize anything. Those who felt like it ambled to the bridge and kept a lookout. Kjell and Bjørn didn't, as they needed to be ready to shoot on a moment's notice- but for the rest of the marine mammal crew – watching was up to them. There was no pattern, no regulation, to our watches. It was haphazard.

There's something about just seeing a marine mammal, out in the ocean, no matter where. It always gives me a huge kick. Even seeing bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales – and I've seen them thousands of times – is a lift. This was my first trip into the Arctic pack, so I was on the bridge almost every daylight moment.

Apart from the novelty, I needed to get my eye in. When we humans look for something (anything), we have a search image – our imagining of what it is we're looking for. Seals on ice are a very different target from whales or dolphins or dugongs in the water. Apart from my time in Ny Ålesund, I didn't have experience with seals on ice - and the view from the Jan Mayen was very different from the little Buster. I was keen to start seeing animals.

Mid-afternoon brought out first sighting, and I missed it – an adult female hooded seal. By the time I got to see her, I was standing on the trawl deck, wearing my fleece-lined overalls, knife in hand. By then, she was a carcass, dangling beneath the cage that the crewman stood in as he was lowered by the crane onto, and off, the ice.

I was working with Lotta, the other research assistant in Tore's marine mammal crew. Lotta was Pippi Longstocking in her thirties – freckles, light blue eyes, red-gold hair, fit.
The carcass thumped to the deck, Lotta and I tied a rope to her hind flippers. Then we attached a set of scales to the crane, signalled to the driver to lower his hook (the cage had been detached while we were busy with the dead seal). The scales had a loop that we attached to the crane's hook, then we signalled to hoist the female – all six feet of her - off the deck. One hundred and sixty-six kilos. Lotta made notes on the data sheet on her clipboard.

The deal seal was deposited on the deck again, on her back. We removed the scales, signalled to the crane driver to lift the empty hook. Tore stepped forward, a look of slight bemusement on his face.

“What is it?”, he asked.

I looked at him, at the seal, blinked. “Hood. Adult female.” What is this – some sort of trick question? How can he not know what this is?

A few weeks previously, I'd been with Nils Eric and Lotta at the aquarium in Bergen, where there were two harbour seals in captivity. Nils Eric had asked if they were ringed seals, and I'd assumed he'd had some sort of brain fart. Maybe not.

I shook my head. Tore stepped forward, to show the measurements we needed to take. Length, girth in a couple of places. Then I had to roll the carcass over – not the easiest operation on an icy steel deck – and measure the thickness of her blubber with a steel ruler.

Time to remove her skin and blubber. First, rolling her over again, her back to the deck. Tore showed me how to get the cutting started, hitting the knife into her body with the heel of my palm. Tough hide. Cuts down the abdomen, around the flippers, the skin and blubber off in one piece, to one side for weighing later. Foreflippers off.

Dissection time. I cut through the muscles of her abdomen, reveal her viscera. She was pregnant, small whitecoat pup curled inside her. It was cut out, weighed. Tore pointed out what he wanted – stomach, large intestine, reproductive tract. A small chunk of blubber, for a colleague of Tore's at the Polar Institute. All dropped into separate, clear plastic bags that Lotta held open. Finally, Tore directed me on how to remove the jaws, using boltcutters.

The centre of Jan Mayen's stern was a large open chute, for trawl nets to slide down. After finishing the dissection, I dragged the carcass to near the chute, where one of the crew would slide it into the sea at the end of the day. I'd just done this when we heard a shot, the crane whirred into action again. The first female was followed by two males.

The fourth carcass was another female. She, too, was pregnant. When her body thudded down, her pup emerged, bleating, onto the deck. He (as we soon knew) was scrawny, still in his white coat, looking more like a baby harp seal than a hood. He wriggled on the deck. A crewman grabbed a hakapik, smashed in his skull.

The crewman looked to Lotta. “Et lieveling” - a little one - he said , shaking his head slowly, as he picked it up.

One more seal was killed before it became too dark to shoot.

I stank. I'd been scrabbling around in seal guts for the past four hours. Just off the trawl deck was a small changing room, for situations like this. It was where Tore kept his watch, sorting the samples that Lotta brought, dropping them in groups in a freezer. Lotta and I climbed out of our overalls and boots, there, washed hands and gloves.

I'd dissected plenty of marine mammals before, mostly dolphins that had washed up dead on a subtropical beach somewhere. Putrid, bloated things. Even though they stank much worse than the seals, what I'd just done felt dirtier.

It must have showed. Lotta, washing her hands next to me, said, “You know, when I went out on my first killing trip, I thought it was really awful. But you get used to it.”.

She smiled at me, shrugged, pale blue eyes, freckles, went back to washing her hands.

Post continues here

Seal stomachs II: On Jan Mayen to Jan Mayen

2007-10-16T13:51:00.000-04:00

This post starts here

We were on Jan Mayen, the research ship, named after Jan Mayen, the island. Like Lance, she's ice-strengthened. She was originally a fishing boat – a stern trawler, catching Arctic shrimp. For some reason, after a couple of years fishing, the government bought her and handed her over to the University of Tromsø for marine research.

Because she's a trawler, Jan Mayen is mostly used for fisheries research. Stepping below decks for the first time, the smell – a decade's worth of leftover fish and shrimp, mixed with more than a hint of diesel – was enough to put my stomach on notice. And we were still at the dock. I had to walk through the steel cavern of fish-processing area to find my cabin, which was tucked along the hull, deep below the waterline. Sofie, along to say goodbye, was turning the same light green as the processing area's paint by the time we'd dumped my gear, traversed the fish processing area again, and emerged into breathable air..

“Ummm - well, this is going to be great, isn't it.”, she said, losing her green tinge with each breath. “I feel like puking and we're not even moving. Yeuckkk. Rather you than me.”.

“Thanks hon. That's all I need – like this'll be such fun.”.

“Oh sweet, you'll be okay. Just get through the first few days and you'll be fine.”.

“Yeah. It's not just seasickness tho'.”.

“I know. Almost a month. I'll miss you.”.

The crew were getting ready to cast off. It was time for Sofie to leave.

After I'd seen Sofie drive off, I joined the rest of the science crew, gathered on the bridge. We watched the hills and islands of Tromsø until it was time to file onto the trawl deck for our safety demonstration. We had the fire drill and lifeboat drill explained to us, well before we sailed out of the protection of islands, and into open water. Once we sailed out of shelter, conditions were rough. The Arctic in late winter.

After my ritual day of feeling seasick, I staggered to the bridge to see who'd found their sea legs and what was happening on the ocean. The bridge was over 30 feet across, with a 270 degree panorama of ocean through armoured windows. A central island of electronics – what looked like a game controller for steering the ship, plus a bank of gizmos for navigation and communication – with a well padded, swivelling armchair, was the nerve centre. The huge windows, blond wood trimmings, carpet, plush chairs – Jan Mayen's bridge was a world away from the dull greens and stench of the fish processing area.

Tore was already ensconced, sitting in a swivelling armchair on the port side, drinking coffee, looking like he hadn't felt a moment's illness, because he hadn't. Viking genetics, perhaps. Outside was rough, dark, rolling ocean. Someone had reported a sperm whale as we'd crossed the edge of Norway's continental shelf, but after that, nothing in the way of marine mammals.

I had a couple of hours of watching waves and avoiding coffee. I find that coffee's one of the best promoters of feeling seasick, and coffee on Norwegian ships is invariably extra-bitter, just to get that nausea-revival really happening. I'd planned on using some spare time on the cruise to teach myself a new computer language, so I trundled below – regaining a slight greenish tinge as I hustled through the fish processing area – and cranked up my laptop. Equipped with a newbie's guide to MatLab programming, I intended to while away the couple of days left to Jan Mayen with some serious geekiness.

It was not to be. The next day, we ran into a gale, and so the ship sat, trudging slowly into huge seas. Everything that wasn't tied down below decks found new and interesting ways to bounce. Holding my laptop still on the desk in my cabin, trying to think, and not falling off my chair became too much of a challenge. Before I broke something (either the laptop or me), I gave up, climbed into my bunk, braced myself and picked up a novel.

After a day's bashing, the storm eased and we could continue on our way to Jan Mayen. We anchored as close to Olonkin Town as possible, and a 14ft Zodiac inflatable was readied on the trawl deck - which, being almost 50 yards long and at least 10 yards wide, had plenty of room for the little inflatable. Despite being at a designated anchorage, and on a decent sized ship, we were rolling. The ship's crane, set on the starboard stern quarter, lifted the Zodiac off the trawl deck. Swung off the ship, hanging over the ocean, it started swaying, and crewman on board kicked it away from the ship's hull. Once it was tied off, Agneta, the nurse we'd brought along, was deposited by crane, along with some bags of post. Tore went too, to help handle the Zodiac.

We were running an errand for the Norwegian government. Julie, the nurse doing a tour on Jan Mayen (the island), had a sick relative and needed to return to Norway. She had to be replaced. No-one just pops out to Jan Mayen, and as we were heading out that way, Tore was asked to make a detour. The Zodiac met with Jan Mayen (the island's) small tender just off the beach.

The chop on the Zodiac's return from their rendezvous was even worse, the Zodiac-swaying even more impressive as it was lifted over, deposited on the trawl deck. Finally people and boat were safely aboard. Jan Mayen (the ship, obviously), upped anchor, steamed for a while, took shelter under Beerenberg, as far inshore as the skipper dared take her. The rough conditions were the prelude to a serious blow, predicted to come out of the west that evening. The volcano's mass would offer some protection.

And blow it did. I was in my cabin, struggling with MatLab, and could feel the ship jarring. I made my way up to the bridge, where there was a wind meter to put the view in context. Despite being in the most sheltered waters we could find, the seas were wild. The wind meter was vacillating around 50 metres per second – 100 knots.

I don't think that I was the only one who was grateful that we were hiding behind Beerenberg.

Post continues here

Seal stomachs I: Harps and Hoods

2007-10-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

The start of this post is here

We steamed slowly through loose pack ice. Harps and hoods are seals of the Arctic pack, and we were sailing through the roof of their world. Kjell and Bjørn shot seals that were resting on floes.

All seals haul themselves out of the water at some time in their lives. Generally, hauled-out equals on-land. But for many polar seals, ashore is ice, simply a change in the phase of water. They live in and on the ocean, resting by climbing onto a handy, frozen chunk of it.

Our imagery of harps comes from pupping time, when mothers-to-be congregate in their thousands. The pictures create an impression of gregariousness. But pupping lasts only a few weeks. For the rest of the year, harps circuit the Arctic Atlantic, and just how sociable they are is not clear. We had stumbled into some harps, clumped enough to suggest sociability. It was late winter, the time for laying down fat, preparing for the stresses of pupping and mating in a few short weeks. Were there so many seals because there was plenty of food nearby, or because harps tend to hang out together? Another unknown.

Flecked in amongst the harps were some hoods.

Hooded seals seem to lead a lonelier - or at least more solitary - life. Even when they give birth, females keep to themselves. One male wins the right to accompany her while she nurses her pup. And hooded seals nurse their young for the shortest span of any mammal – four days. So a hooded seal “family” (as they're known) mum, pup and male – is a rather brief relationship.

It's through their pups that we make our links between harps and hoods. We find pups of both species on pack ice, close to the ice edge, together. More or less. “We” being, almost always, hunters. Most of the interest that people have in harps and hoods is thanks to the fur wrapped around pups. Harp seal pups are no longer killed for their famous white coats, but for the fur that reveals itself once that white moults - a couple of weeks' difference. Hooded seal babies are killed for the fur they're born with – the two-tone that gives them one of their names - bluebacks. They, too have a white coat, but they moult it before they're even born. Only four days suckling with mum - they have no time to waste.

Harps and hoods differ in other ways too. Harps are the smaller, with females growing to about five-and-a-half feet and somewhere under 300 pounds, and males marginally bigger. Hoods are much larger again, with females of nearly 7 feet and 350 pounds. But male hoods are giants in comparison, reaching over eight feet and weighing in at around 650 pounds. Adult male hoods also have a huge, flubby nose, complete with a large reddish balloon that they can blow out of their left nostril. For reasons that are, no doubt, obvious to other hooded seals.

Unlike harps, there's no population of hooded seals breeding off northwestern Russia. Hoods are seals of the western Atlantic basin: three of four subpopulations live among the ice and islands between Canada and Greenland. The seals we were killing were probably from the westernmost subpopulation of hoods, breeding in the West Ice (off eastern Greenland, the name comes from it being west to Norwegians) – the same place as the central population of harp seals.

Although hoods don't occur in the Barents Sea, individuals occasionally find their way to the Caribbean. Harp seals ignore the lure of the tropics.

It's not only in two dimensions - latitude and longitude - that harps and hoods differ. There's also the ocean's third dimension – depth. Harps are fairly shallow divers, usually staying within a couple of hundred metres of the surface. Hoods, on the other hand, are much deeper divers, and can swim down to over a kilometre.

How do we know where these seals dive to, in remote Arctic waters? Nuclear submarines on the lookout? No. We know this because scientists (Garry among them) have attached satellite-linked time-depth recorders (acronymed into SLTDRs) to these seals. SLTDRs are miniature computers (they range in size from a little bigger than a TV remote control to about the size of four bars of soap) that are glued onto the top of seals' heads. There they sit, sensors recording time and depth every few seconds, storing and assimilating numbers. Then, when the right satellite appears in the sky, and the seal – and hence the antenna – is at the surface, the SLTDR dutifully dumps its data via radio link.

From the way the message is received by the satellite, the position of the transmitter (and hence, the seal) can be calculated. So we can infer, from the depths and shapes of dives (coupled with their changes in geographical position), what seals have been doing underwater – travelling, feeding, sleeping. And then from looking at where and how deep seals are on their feeding dives, we can make inferences as to what seals are eating. Because the transmitter is glued onto the hair on a seal's back, it just falls off when the seal moults, as they do every year.

But we weren't doing anything as technically sophisticated as attaching computers to seals. On our expedition, we were just killing, and cutting open. It's the oldest, and simplest, scientific method available to infer marine mammals' diet, but it's still used in the 21st Century. And we weren't really where we'd intended to be when we'd started the cruise a couple of weeks earlier. A minor mishap had brought us south, to Iceland, from the West Ice a few hundred sea miles north.

Post continues here

A seal and a sledgehammer

2007-09-20T10:48:00.000-04:00

February 2001, Denmark Strait

The seals lie in rows on the steel deck, dead. Their blood congeals, freezes into pools, dark red ice between the bodies. They're a mix, harps and hoods. Mostly small, juveniles – young hoods in two-tone, blue-gray backs, cream bellies; harps in greys and dark speckles. But some larger bodies are arriving, adults - almost all harps.

A warning - expletives and gore follow.

The crane's motor whirs, the cage appears, lifting, the crewman inside with another corpse, impaled on the spike of his hakapik. The cage swings toward us, descends, angles towards the stern, the end of the lines of bodies. There's a thump as the crewman kicks the corpse off the hakapik, the new addition drops those final feet. It lies on the deck, bleeding. The crane's already whirring again, the cage lifting, swinging, the crewman bound for the ice once more.

A seal lies on her back, skinned, slit open, dead. I cut through her abdominal muscles, reach inside with my rubber-gloved hands, move entrails. Hold her stomach, slice it out from the rest of her digestive tract, drop the lump to the clear plastic bag that Lotta's holding open. Scrabble a little more through entrails, sloppy, stinking, find the large intestine. Trace it back from her anus. Hold both ends again, two cuts, the end of her gut - about a foot long - drops into another bag Lotta has ready. She makes some notes in black marker. I move entrails aside once more, find the seal's ovaries tucked against muscle wall. Two more quick slices, another plastic bag, we're done.

Now her jaw. I pick up the boltcutters lying where I'd left them last, the gap where I'd dissected the last seal. At least I can stand, give my back a rest. I prise her mouth open, set the jaws of the cutter back as far as I can on her lower jaw, right back where mandible meets cranium. Stand, squeeze in on the handles of the boltcutter. Finally, a crack, bone breaks. I repeat, cut the other side, and her lower jaw comes off. Another plastic bag, and her jaw – with teeth, from which we'll be able to tell her age – is labelled to match the other chunks of her body that we're saving.

I drag what remains of her skinned, eviscerated body towards the stern, to join the growing pile of bloody leftovers there. There are small chunks of muscle, guts lying around, freezing solid, everywhere. She's adult, so no-one will come for her meat, as they do the pups. I walk the few steps back, past the growing lines of dead seals. A couple of dozen now.

We've found a patch of several dozens - possibly hundreds – of seals on the ice, and finally, we're working hard. I hear another crack, as either Kjell or Bjørn pots another seal. I walk past one with a neck wound. With so many seals around, Kjell's now using his semi-automatic .308. Seems it's not as accurate as his bolt-action rifle – or Bjørn's – as the seals haven't all been shot in the head. Some are turning up with neck or chest shots, the occasional one with two bullet holes where Kjell's put a second round into them, to make sure.

Next one.

I bend over, tap the knuckle of my index finger on its eye – the blink test. Adult male, by his broader, chocolate brown head. No blink, he's dead. The crewman is supposed to do this when he first gets to them, on the ice, but my gut tells me he's not. Lotta has the tape, we measure length. Girth measure next, so I have to roll the seal over. Today's been almost all harps, some over 300 pounds, and I'm tiring. With a steel ruler, I measure the thickness of his blubber.

I bend down, pick up my knife. In my peripheral vision, I see Jim walking the rows of seals, shaking his head. He stops, shouts, “Hey, this one's not dead”.

I get up, walk over. It's happened before – seals appearing to breathe after they're already dead - something to do with their diving behaviour. It's why I always blink-test every corpse.

Jim isn't a marine mammal biologist – he's along to study the proteins that stop ice-dwelling fishes' blood from freezing. No-one had warned him about the seal killing.

He's right. A adult female harp seal is lying in the middle of a row, chest shuddering. She's older – the tan-brown, curved V patterned on her back shows clearly - the harp that gives these seals their name. Neck wound. It certainly looks like she's breathing. I bend over, blink-test her, and she blinks. I look up at Jim who's standing above me, arms folded.

“Yeah, she's alive.”. Jim shakes his head, glares.

I look around. There's a sledgehammer leaning against a wall, by the edge of the trawl deck. I walk over to get it.

Fuck. How long has she been lying there? Half an hour? An hour? More? Fuck. Isn't that dickhead supposed to do this BEFORE they come on board?

I grab the sledgehammer, walk back. Jim steps away. I meet his eyes, shake my head. I position myself, think about my aim, swing. My first blow's slightly off, hits the seal where her braincase meets her muzzle. A few chunks of skin and bone mulch into the steel deck. Frontal lobe peeks through.

Fuck. Quickly, poor thing.

I swing hard, hit true. The bone of her skull splinters under the hammer, revealing brain, light grey jelly. Again, to make sure. The next hit slams through what's left of the top of her skull. All of her brain now lies, open, mush on the deck.

Still holding the sledgehammer, I bend down, looking to blink test again. Some of her eye isn't splattered, I tap it. No response. I tap again, watching her chest. She's dead.

I stand. Look around. Everyone's watching, curious. I breathe out, put the sledgehammer back where I found it. No-one speaks.

I return to skinning.

Post continues here

West Ice survey 2002: final

2007-09-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here

We tagged for a few more days. The ice was breaking up, pups were more spread out. Callan and I had trouble meeting up with Sofie and Ilse for a helicopter pickup – the ice was moving so fast in the wind and swell that their icehopping wasn't making headway towards us.

Interesting experience.

On the ice, scattered floes, scattered pups, we had a final scare. Lance was steaming near us. Floes started jostling each other in her wash, making movement difficult. Just standing still was getting dangerous. Lance kept coming, steamed to within a couple of hundred yards from where we were tagging. When only two big floes away, we realized that the crew hadn't noticed us. They were still coming

Garry radioed, and with a sharpness I'd not heard from him before, said, “Lance, what do you think you're doing?”.

They slowed, backed off, angled away. We could move again.

Then we heard it, and knew what had been so important. Crack crack – shots - explained their inattention. More seals killed to pass the time, using the excuse of Tore's permit. So much more important than tagging.

Sofie and I looked at each other. Ilse was recording a pup's calls, we were just hoping that she wouldn't hear the shots. Of course she did. When she'd finished the recordings, she walked to us, pale, eyes empty. We all looked at each other, shook our heads.

We kept working. Sofie and Ilse had trouble getting any recordings, and tagging got tougher. Females started coming for us as soon as we stood on the floe that held their pup. Spooked? Spooked didn't come close. The mothers were furious, terrified, ready to attack.

That last afternoon, we left more pups to aggressive mothers than we had for the entire time we'd been on the ice. And the floes were more spaced out. A debacle.

There were a couple of pups in the late afternoon, stuck on floes that would have taken some extra-adventurous icehopping to approach. We surveyed a path, started off. More open water than we'd thought. Garry saw a way through. Maybe. I shrugged my shoulders, shook my head – we'd already tagged hundreds of pups over the past few weeks.

“Garry”, I said, “are a couple of pups really going to make a difference?”.

He shrugged, pulled out the radio, called the helicopter.

It was our last walk on the ice.

The white pelts – the reason the pups were killed - weren't cleaned or salted on the voyage back. By the time we reached Tromsø, they were rubbish, unfit for any use. That anyone could view those small bundles of white, living joy as nothing more waste inside a fur seemed heartless to me. But to let the furs then rot was unimaginable, until I remembered. They're pests. They eat fish.

West Ice survey 2002:VII

2007-09-17T16:22:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here.

Life on Lance took on its own pattern. Our routines were fun, days spent icehopping, tagging seals, helicopter flights for extra entertainment. Evenings of meals, meetings in the large room across from our cabin to debrief and plan the next day, occasional videos. Most days, after dinner but before our meetings, I'd be inputting data, while Sofie and Ilse spent an hour or so on the roof of the ship's bridgedeck, recording the behaviour of pups. Bjørn and Nils Eric found Sofie and Ilse incomprehensible - they chose to spend extra time – drinking time - out in the cold. And, for all possible reasons, to watch pups' behaviour.

Life for the crew was different. We were hardly moving, the ice presented no real threats, so the ship was secure. The crew's workload was drastically reduced, so the captain seized the opportunity to catch up with some maintenance. Empty cabins were repainted. Some of Lance's crew were itching to get out on the ice.

The weather was warming, we had a little more sunlight each day. Some larger stretches of water appeared between floes. Pups were losing their white coats.

Tore contacted Kjell regularly. They were flying - mostly from Jan Mayen - checking for any other whelping patches. There weren't any more. Over beers in the evening, Tore and Garry's discussions on when to run the final helicopter survey got serious.

We'd been out tagging, one of those afternoons with Lance below the horizon, hours of seals and ice. Callan and I always made for the bow, entered the covered fo'csle to a lab where we'd wash our woollen gloves then drop them in some detergent to soak overnight. We'd slip down the companionway to the storage area below, ditch our floater suits and Sorrel boots, pull on some sandshoes, head back towards Lance's centre. Callan made for his room, I climbed up the steps to our cabin. Sofie was waiting there, mouth drawn, eyes hard.

“What is it?”, I asked.

She snorted, tipped her head, eyes pointing to the stern. “Look at this.”.

It was only a few yards, past Tore's cabin, to the door opening to the stern. As we stepped out, Sofie pointed to something hanging from the metal pipes that crisscrossed the deck's roofed areas. A few scrawny little black-red corpses, the meat cut from them, hung downwards. In a corner, a pile of dirty white pelts lay in a heap.

“They've been shooting”, she said.

She turned, walked back to our cabin, sat on the lower bunk. “So, are you going to say something to Tore?”, she asked.

“And say what? He gets permits to shoot hundreds of fucking seals each year. He'll have an excuse for it. Saying anything will just make life difficult for the rest of the time we're out here.”.

Sofie frowned.

Norwegian sealers aren't allowed to hunt whitecoat pups, so white pelts are rarities now. It's one remaining success from earlier anti-sealing campaigns. The crew were getting bored, so Tore had indulged them by allowing them to shoot a few whitecoats.

Genetic samples, apparently.

Had anyone asked for genetic samples, we'd have brought back chunks of afterbirth that would have served just as well. We'd even have brought back the carcasses of pups that had died naturally. No-one ever asked, of course.

The following night, seal pup stew appeared for dinner. Dark, pungent, purple-brown meat in thick gravy. Thankfully, the cook had the decency to offer another choice (veggie lasagne, as Ilse was vegetarian) for those of us who couldn't stomach pup stew.

A few days later, we were heading down from the helicopter deck again. Sofie and Ilse left, Callan and I sorted out some gear. Finished, we made for our cabins. Sofie and Ilse were standing on the walkway of the boat deck, looking forward. Ilse seemed pale, like she was about to throw up. Sofie looked ready to explode.

“What's up?”, I asked.

“Have a look. Lotta just told Ilse that the guys were playing with a female hooded seal on the front deck”.

Playing indeed. Someone had shot a big female hood, and the crew were butchering and skinning her on the deck. Dark blood spread everywhere, pooled into the ice slush. Callan and I walked down, stepped around the carcass. We left a trail of bloody bootprints into the fo'csle.

I worked through my cleaning ritual – gloves washed, grubby gear off, (and blood washed off boots for a special addition), wandered back. Sofie was standing outside Tore's cabin. I caught “we didn't expect to see this shooting......”, saw the half-smile on Tore's face, looking down on Sofie, as I walked into our cabin.

Luckily, it was time to run the final helicopter survey over our whelping patch, and everyone was too busy for a couple of days for anything else. Shoot more seals, for instance. The conditions stayed fine, clear skies and almost no wind. We'd been impossibly lucky with weather. The helicopter survey went as near to perfect as these things ever go.

All that was left was for Kjell to fly the photographic survey. The weather stayed awesome - clear, sunny and calm, but we'd seen no sign of the plane for a few days. Kjell was working out of Jan Mayen, but the dirt strip there was muddy and unusable. Local rain.

Late one morning, Callan, Garry and I were out tagging seals. We still couldn't believe our luck with the weather, blue skies with no wind. It was to dream of in the Arctic, and there was no way it was going to last forever. The hours passed, we tagged dozens of pups, but something was clearly bugging Garry. He kept looking up and around. Finally, he pulled out the radio, called Tore.

“Tore, can you get on the phone to Jan Mayen, ask Kjell what's happening to the plane”.

A few minutes later, Tore called back. Garry listened, nodded, coloured. “Okay”.

“What's the score?” I asked.

“They had a party last night at Jan Mayen. Kjell isn't even up yet.”. It was getting on to midday.

Alcohol is tax-free on Jan Mayen.

Kjell ran the photographic survey a couple of days later.
Read the final part of this post here.

West Ice survey 2002:VI

2007-09-17T15:44:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here.
Harp seal hunting has burgeoned over the past few years. Back in 2002, the hunt of the population we were surveying was small – a couple of thousand animals at most. Almost all publicity is on the Canadian hunt, but there are four different hunts on three separate populations of harp seals. The biggest, most famous, population (and hunt) of harp seals is found in the waters between eastern Canada and Greenland. Another group of harp seals breeds on the ice off the eastern side of Greenland, and lives in the Arctic Ocean, between Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. A third population lives in the Barents Sea, and gives birth on the ice off northwest Russia.

Over three years in the early 21st Century, Canadian sealers killed nearly three-quarters of a million harp seals, all under a government quota. Once again, Canadians can claim the biggest hunt of marine mammals in the world. But Canada is not alone. In 2005, more Norwegian sealing boats headed to sea than at any time in the past two decades. In Norway, there's talk of offering “quota bonuses” - higher quotas for the fish that they catch over the rest of the year – to fishermen who are prepared to risk tearing their vessels open in the pack ice to get to seals - or who'll risk the financial and fuel costs of ice-strengthening their boats. There have even been calls in Norway for a return to hunting whitecoat pups.

Harp seal hunting never really went away; it just dropped from public view. Since 1970, in the years for which hunt data are reliable (there are a few glitches in the records), there was no year where people killed less than 100,000 harp seals.

Most of the harp seals killed are from the largest population, off the Canadian coast. These days, most killing is done by Canadians. But in decades past, Norwegians were the main players. Other hunts take place off the east Greenland coast, (the “West Ice” to Norwegians, where we were on this trip), off the White Sea (the “East Ice” to Norwegians), and off western Greenland. Norwegians and Russians (or Soviets, in times past) hunted seals off the West Ice and East Ice. Now the West Ice hunt is all Norwegian, the White Sea hunt mostly Russian, but Norwegians have moved back there recently. Greenlanders hunt mainly off west Greenland.

Despite receiving the most publicity, the Canadian hunt of harp seals hasn't always been the biggest. For example in 1985, just under 20,000 harp seals were killed in the smallest Canadian hunt on record. Yet a total of over 120,000 harp seals were killed that year, over 80,000 in the East Ice, and more than 20,000 by Greenlanders. And the real number of seals killed is always greater than the records show. The quoted numbers are the size of the catch that is “landed” – brought back to port. There are always some seals that are mortally wounded and not recovered - not “landed” - so these numbers of dead seals are all underestimates.

The government agencies tasked with regulating seal hunts need to know something about the populations being hunted. Enter scientists. Estimates of animal abundance have to come from somewhere, and there's a little more to counting animals than taking your shoes off once you've seen ten. Grand plans for “managing” animals amount to nothing if there aren't people with the scientific nous and physical capacity to work out how many animals actually exist. Off the West Ice, that includes working in one of the most extreme settings our planet has to offer.

Read the next part of this post here

West Ice survey 2002:V

2007-09-17T14:46:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here.

We were surrounded by thousands of young pups, lying on ice. We'd found our home for the voyage.

Most mums were in the water when we'd get to their pan, a few stayed, watched us suspiciously, then glomp into the water. Up close, adult female harp seals are big enough - Labrador faces, rottweiler teeth, more mass than us but built for swimming. Solids belong to us, liquid to them, so they were slower on the ice, than we were. But not by much. The occasional mum took offence at molestation of her pup. So one of us tagged, quick as possible, another kept mum away.

Our hakapiks were on long birch poles, so we'd fence with the mothers. Some used cunning plans – swooshing out somewhere different each time, circuiting the pan, looking for an opening. Or the direct approach, a mum just charged us, teeth bared. Poke poke poke back, trying not to hit her too hard: deter-hard, not injure-hard. An interesting balance. We had a few near misses with their big canine teeth, but not even a tear to a floater suit. One or two mums were just up-front aggressive. There was no deter-hard, they just kept on coming. We weren't prepared to risk seriously injuring a mother just to tag her pup, so we left them alone.

As the days passed, life on the patch changed. Males appeared more and more, with their broader, bigger, heavier heads; darker chocolate brown upper bodies. They'd cruise in groups of a dozen or so, watching us, doggy faces, bobbing, damp hand puppets in the open water between the pans. The water was crystal. Males displayed, look-at-me underwater swoops, we'd lean over the edge of a pan to watch. They'd hang around in the biggest patches of open water.

Male calls sang through the water, into the air for us to hear. Their calls were shorter, more varied than the bearded seals in Svalbard. When we took a coffee and chocolate break with Sofie and Ilse, they'd drop in a hydrophone, we'd take turned listening.

Were the males singing to females - pick me, pick me, pick me; or were these just warnings to other males? We weren't in a position to resolve that one. Harp seal society remains a mystery.

Females in their tens of thousands were nearing the end of nursing. Pups filled out, firm teddy bodies, Greenpeace poster-child eyes. Ludicrously cute. Some started losing their trademark white fur. Stronger, wrigglier, some became quicker across the ice, others too fat to worry, just a bleat as the tag clipped in, then back to resting and growing.

The weather stayed good – we were out almost every day. The bliss of activity. No thinking beyond finding the next pup, planning a route across the floes to reach it, watching for angry mums, catching. Locating the next cluster of pups. Keeping warm, gloves off to tag, back on fast. We tagged carefully, trying not to draw blood from pups. The icescape changed with the days, Lance lying still in the ice, drifting.

After dinner on Lance, Lotta or Nils Eric would give me their day's data sheets, I'd input the data from tagging – the sex and stage of each of dozens of pups, their tag number – into a spreadsheet. Depending on how the day went, an hour or so of input, then some more time rechecking. Finished, I'd join the others for a beer to discuss the day's work.

The records were needed for when the tags were returned. A returned tag would mean a dead seal, either drowned in fishing gear or killed by hunters.

Read the next part of this post here.

West Ice survey 2002:IV

2007-09-17T14:40:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here
Those forays on the floes, although enormous fun, were really an aside. We had to be out on the ice for a few weeks, but only needed a few days for the aerial surveys. So tagging was useful, but not the primary objective of the expedition. Our main task was to fly over the whelping patches of females and count newborn pups.

The harp seals that meet off east Greenland are wanderers of the Arctic Atlantic. After giving birth in the West Ice, they either swim north along Greenland's east coast, east to Svalbard; or to Iceland and points south - some almost to Scotland's Western Isles - with occasional forays to the Norwegian coast. The only time all members of the population seem to get together is at pupping. Even then, the males are mostly underwater, females often in the water, and only the pups stay on ice floes.

This means that pups are the most reliable animals to count. That was why we had the helicopter, to fly transects - regularly spaced lines - over each patch in order to estimate the number of pups born. But there's a catch (in field biology, there's always a catch). All harp seals in a population give birth over a short period in March and April - exactly when varies between the three separate Arctic populations. Generally, the females in an individual whelping patch all give birth within two weeks of each other. Harp pups suckle for less than two weeks - the average is 12 days. Towards the end of those 12 days, pups moult their trademark white fur, replace it with their adult coat, and start contemplating their future as swimmers, rather than ice floe couch-potatoes. This means that once pups have moulted their white fur, there's no guarantee that they'll stay on the ice. Getting the survey timing right – including allowing for weather and pups' maturation – is the crucial balancing act of the exercise.

While they're suckling, pups change size and shape so quickly that it's possible to estimate their age to within a couple of days. Seal biologists have developed a system for categorizing pups into seven stages of these first few days of life, based on how they look. So, by flying a series of surveys using the helicopter, in which we estimate the stages of each pup seen, we could get a quick-and-dirty overview of the relative age of the pups there. Additionally, we recorded the stage of every pup that we tagged when we were out on the ice. Between the “staging surveys” as Garry called them (they're a Canadian invention), and our tagging data we had a pretty good sense of the age of pups in a patch.

Initially, we'd see many tiny white pups, lots of fresh-frozen meaty afterbirths, and some very satisfied looking gulls. After a few days, newborns became less common. We had to make some tradeoffs with timing for running a counting survey - flying over the patch to estimate the number of pups born, as distinct from the staging surveys – too early, and there'd be pregnant females with pups still to be born, too late and the some pups could have already taken to the water. And of course, we needed to think about weather and safety, too.

The Arctic's like that.

It was time to prepare for the counting survey, to work out our observers' strip widths.

We needed to know the area covered by each transect – the length was easily calculated from GPS-derived start and stop points, but width is slightly more complex. Strip width, from simple geometry, depends on the height that the helicopter flies – higher gives a wider strip, but fly too high and pups get hard to see. This is the most simple form of what's known in the trade as distance sampling - the observers should be able to reliably count every pup that is within the strip, and so there to be counted. If the area through the helicopter window was too large, pups would be missed.

Once our strip width was established, we'd know the area (transect length multiplied by strip width) that we'd sampled. As we also knew the total area occupied by all the seals in the whelping patch, we could calculate the proportion of the patch that we'd sampled. From years of experience, the Canadians worked with a strip of 30 metres when the helicopter flew at 100 feet.

Ivan and I were the observers. We needed to get our 30 metre strips marked out. So, Ivan Tore, Garry and I jumped in the helicopter and flew out to some large pans well away from any seals. We checked there were no polar bears around (as we hadn't brought rifles), then landed. Tore and Garry got out with a measuring tape. They marked out two strips, 30 metres apart, then lay inside them, doing seal impersonations. Ivan and I were taken to 100 feet above the ice - the helicopter had an altimeter that used a laser for measurement, so we knew it was accurate. Then we made ourselves as comfortable as possible while turned sideways in a helicopter seat, and nursing an old laptop computer. One at a time, we directed the pilot until the lower strip on the ground was just blocked by the helicopter's lower skid, then marked off the top line with a bit of electrical tape on the window. Field biology survives on electrical tape, duct tape and cable ties. We retrieved our seal impersonators and flew back to Lance.

And then Garry, Ivan and I practised. Our laptops were linked to a GPS receiver, with a little program (courtesy of one of Garry's computer wizards) written so that whenever we pressed the keyboard, it stored a position fix from the GPS. Unfortunately, it only worked on Windows 98 machines, so we'd had to drag out a couple of somewhat antique laptops for the trip. Ivan and I had to tap a key to record each time we saw a harp seal pup. As well, we'd call out our sightings as we made them, into the microphones of the aircraft headsets that we all wore. Garry recorded our numbers into a notebook as backup to the computers.

All my previous experience with strip transects had been with whales, dolphins or dugongs1 – mammals in the ocean, with an unfortunate habit of diving, and so being mostly out of view. To me, counting animals that lay stationary on the ice seemed a bit like cheating. A few practice runs and we were ready for the real thing.

These visual surveys from the helicopter don't provide a permanent record of the seals we actually saw. So, Kjell and his crew in the plane were also going to fly over each patch. As the plane had an aerial photogrammetric camera aboard, they could photograph a series of transects over the whelping patches as well. Photographs provide a permanent record of the survey. The concept is exactly the same as the helicopter counts, except that the photos create their own strips.

As the time neared to run the full survey on the first patch we found, Kjell radioed to announce that from the plane they'd found another, far larger patch a few hours' steam to the west. Lance's engines came back to life for a few hours.

Read the next part of this post here.

West Ice survey 2002:III

2007-09-17T14:26:00.000-04:00

Read the first part of this post here

The A team - now Nils Eric, Bjørn, Lotta and Ivan - made their first trips onto the ice. Tore, coffee in hand, coordinated activities from Lance's bridge.
Garry was the only one of the B team with ice-floe-hopping experience, so for the first few hours, Garry showed we novices how to get around.
Moving on the pans was all about avoiding falling in. With the water at –2C, the air at -10C, a dunk in the water would have meant calling for the helicopter to get us back to the ship to dry out. The biggest pans got to more than 50 metres diameter, the smallest, little ice cubes. With a big swell running, pans drift apart, tripling the jumping distance between them.

We had unusual tools to help us hold and steady smaller floes. Back in Tromsø, Nils Eric had collected birch poles to make a few hakapiks1, Norwegian seal clubs - a black steel head on a birch pole. The pole's a little over five feet long. On one side of the metal head is a short knob, used to smash in the skulls of baby seals. The other end of the head has a spike, about six inches long, used by sealers to drag carcasses along the ice. The spike is great for whacking into ice, dragging pans as needed. So we'd swing, lean and haul, everyone across, then whoever held the hakapik jumped. Mostly we just hopped, pan to pan. Timing was all, particularly when a small chunk had to be used for a stepping stone. Being stuck on a sinking chunk of oversized slushie, watching more solid ice move beyond jumping range could be a little disconcerting.

After a couple of excursions, Bjørn's decades on the ice started to tell and he spent most of the time in his cabin. The A team, morphed into Nils Eric, Lotta, and Ivan, were more aggressive with their icehopping and had a couple of drenchings. The legs of our floater suits were reasonably watertight, and the suits were made so that you needed to be immersed almost to your underarms before water could spill into the suit from the top. Even so, Nils Eric and Lotta occasionally needed a helicopter pickup after a particularly deep mishap. We novices were far more cautious.

Garry, Callan and I would wander off, tagging pups. Sofie and Ilse moved less, as their recordings required more time with each pup. They'd find one, a little away from where we were tagging, and record its calls. They needed several from each pup – the demands of statistics. So they'd lie out next to a pup, trying to look inconspicuous in their bright orange floater suits, and stick a microphone as close as they could to the pup, and hope the pup felt like calling. Tore christened them “the pup interviewers”.

Female harp seals spend some of their time in the water, so to find their pup - the ice keeps moving – they must listen for them. Once they've located their pup's general direction, they slip onto the appropriate floe, and check any pups there either by their scent, or by their feel. To do this, the mum goes up to a pup and rubs noses – either smelling up close, or using the bristles around their nose to feel for something distinctive about their particular pup. It looks just like mums greet their pup with a kiss.

Just in case the pups, by themselves, weren't cute enough.

Garry's experience meant that he led from the start. But as he was also the heaviest, physics provided our verb of the trip: Stensoning. To Stenson was to push hard off a small chunk of ice, leaving the next unfortunate dealing with a half-submerged iceblob, calling, “Oh No! I've been Stensoned!”. After a few days, Garry made a habit of bringing up the rear.

The days passed, and Garry needed to spend some time on the ship, sorting out the design of the helicopter surveys with Tore. Callan and I worked together. Callan was lighter and braver than I. He tended to lead the way when Ilse and Sofie were near us, finding the safest and easiest routes. He overdid it badly once – stepped onto a small chunk, maybe two feet square. Immediately half of it collapsed into the sea. Callan was waiting for the swell to bring the next large pan close to him. He turned, laughed, said, “Well, don’t stand on that bit”. As he did, the leftover that he was standing on (just big enough for his feet) disappeared into slush under him. He dropped, eyes widening as he went. I reached out, grabbed his arm, pulled. He was only wet to his knees. Sofie and Ilse took care of Callan, dragging his boots off, drying his feet, replacing his socks with dry ones, filling him with chocolate and coffee. We sat around until we knew he'd be dry enough to keep going, then found another path.

When it came to icehopping, I guess I was lucky. On one of our first days out, I had a sad moment on some slush. I'd gone last, and the stepping-stone piece of ice was looking a little Stensoned after Garry and Callan had traversed it. There was a big swell running, pans moving three or four yards away from each other. I jumped onto the stepping slush, and it started sinking. I'd timed it badly, the next pan was still moving away. Seconds passed, spent waiting for the swells to bring the next big pan towards me. Seconds can seem rather long. Water rose over the rubberised soles of my Sorrels, started seeping under the legs of my floater suit. Eventually I could jump. After that learning experience, I seem to manage to jump – fall, lurch, blob, roll - the right way. Hardly ever got my feet wet. It's amazing how important dry socks are.

Sofie and Ilse never had any serious problems. Perhaps I could pretend that this had something to do with chivalry from us men, but I'd be lying. They were light, sensible and athletic.

Read th next part of this post here.

West Ice survey 2002:II

2007-08-08T16:01:00.000-04:00

[read the first part of this post here]
Beerenberg (pronounced beer'n'burger, without the final er) loomed. Rising seven-and-a-half thousand feet straight out of the Arctic Ocean, it's the world's northernmost active volcano, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge peeking above the sea. It's Norwegian territory, just like Bouvetøya (boo-vet-oi-ya), the Ridge's southernmost island, over 8,500 miles away. Glaciated lava, iced cone swathed in cloud, it's stark, massive, impressive. Jan Mayen, the island, comprises Beerenberg and its cooled lava flows. The Norwegian government runs a meteorological station and a LORAN station there.

The morning of March 15th saw us anchored off Olonkin Town, base for the 18 people who live on Jan Mayen. It's not the easiest place to approach, but the helicopter meant we could all visit. First, unloading the fuel barrels. The Squirrel was unlashed and most of us helped with getting the rotors attached. There's something odd about standing on the deck of a ship in the Arctic, holding a helicopter's rotors in place while a mechanic fiddles with some nuts and bolts, turning the helicopter back into a flying machine.

The fuel cans were ferried ashore in fours, hanging on about a hundred feet of line. Finally, our first ride on this chopper. Three abreast in the back seat, and in our flotation suits, things were a little snug. From the air, Olonkin forms a long L with two arms running off it, the foot of the L paralleling a ridgeline extending down from Beerenberg. A couple of huge tanks for diesel – generator fuel – and scattered sheds complete the installation.

We were deposited by a shed, close to the main entrance. A short trudge through snow and we were escaping our flotation suits and Sorrel boots. We entered another little cocoon of Norway, down to the overstuffed leather armchairs and the wood panelling, blond and knotty. A guided tour took in radios, computers, diesel generators, living quarters, displays of station history, coffee and cake. There was even a little shop, complete with Jan Mayen t-shirts, cloth patches and postcards, for the (very) occasional cruise ship that stops off at the island. Garry bought t-shirts for his kids, a few postcards were mailed from the station's post office, and it was time for the helicopter ride back to the ship.

And then we steamed out to the pack ice. A couple of days away from Jan Mayen and we were around the first floes. Once at the edge of the pack, the seas gentled, ice damping the capacity of wind to build waves. Sofie and Ilse returned to normal, resurrected from their cabins. We gathered on the bridge, binoculars ready, eager to find seals. I had no worries on this trip equating sightings with death. The Squirrel was unpacked again, rotors reattached, and some reconnaissance surveys started. Tore designated himself, Nils Eric and Bjørn as the “A” team, responsible for finding seals. The rest of us waited on the ship.

We had only the helicopter for scouting trips. Kjell and his Piper Navajo were grounded at Nerlerit Inaat, waiting repairs. They'd had engine trouble on the crossing from Iceland to east Greenland. Not the easiest place in the world for something to go wrong. So Lance cruised just inside the ice edge, the captain regularly climbing to the observation tower up the mast to pick our path through the maze of floes. And the ice never stops moving.

Lance's captain was one of those Norwegians who showed why sometimes it made perfect sense to be serious and unsmiling. He was a thin, fit man, with an almost-cadaverous face. His bald head, invariably serious expression and penchant for wearing black meant he looked like the bad guy from a cheesy action movie. It was a deception. He was exceptionally experienced, and this was his last voyage before retirement. The serious look was real, as Lance, although strong, isn't rated as an icebreaker. He was careful with manoeuvring her in the pack. He cared for his ship and crew, thought safety was paramount, and didn't cop any bullshit. I liked him.

Although harp seals give birth in more-or-less the same place each year, “more-or-less” still meant searching hundreds of square miles of pack ice. Tore's initial search strategy seemed pretty haphazard - fly out to the north or south, then doodle along the ice edge. Over coffee in the bridge, Garry suggested some zig-zags from the ice edge inwards.

We were early. Tore had – rightly – decided to get to the pack a week or so before the first pups might appear, allowing plenty of time to find seals, and deal with any problems that might arise (Kjell's plane lacking an engine, for instance). After a few fruitless days, Kjell was back in the air. Finally, they found the first small patch of females, coming together, preparing for birth. Once we'd found them from Lance, it was time for the gizmos.

We had satellite transmitters to deploy. Bulky cylinders, a little over a metre long, they're normally used by Canadian oceanographers to track the movements of ice floes. Pack ice travels with currents and weather, so if a storm hit once we were with whelping females, we could lose days of work. More important, we'd be blown away from our seals. Then, once the weather cleared, we'd have to start from scratch to find the females all over again. Hence the satellite transmitter, sending a signal up to a set of French satellites used in environmental monitoring. The signal would allow us to relocate females fairly easily if we were separated from them by a storm. But the transmitter gave its position to a few miles, so we also put out radio transmitters. They produced a much shorter-range signal that we could detect with the antennae we'd bolted onto the helicopter's skids.

So Garry, Callan and I jumped into the helicopter with our equipment, and were flown out to the seals. Bemused seals stared up, we stared down, looking for a thick, largish floe - preferably with an ice mound - somewhere near the middle of the patch. Once we'd found a suitable candidate, we jumped out, built a small ice-castle for the radio transmitter, and added the satellite transmitter. Garry turned the transmitters on. For a final touch, we adorned our little ice castle with bright pink dye, then strewed several bagsfull of of dye all over the floe. We called the helicopter back down, made sure that the radio signal was working, and returned to Lance to check that the satellite transmitter was beeping as well.

Everything worked. We never needed the satellite transmitter in our three weeks on the ice, only occasionally needed the radio signals, and the pink dye alone was usually enough for us to locate our seals. We were incredibly lucky with weather.

Read the next part of this post here.

West Ice survey 2002: I

2007-08-07T15:34:00.000-04:00

[read the start of this post here.]
Lance (pronounced Lancer), the Norwegian Polar Institute's expedition vessel, was our home for this voyage. We were to do a survey, estimating the number of pups born into the harp seal population off eastern Greenland in 2002. An ice-strengthened ship with a helicopter pad was essential, and Lance was one of only two Norwegian possibilities. The other was going seal hunting, and unavailable anyway. Originally launched as a fishing and sealing ship in the late 1970s, Lance quickly became the property of the Norwegian government. She spends most of her time in the Barents Sea and off Svalbard, with occasional forays to the Norwegian territory in the Antarctic.

Garry, Callan and Ilse all stayed with Sofie and me for a couple of days prior to departure. Garry, greying, coming into a paunch, is one of the senior Canadian government scientists responsible for assessing the size of harp seal populations off Canada. He was our aerial survey expert. Callan, from the University of St Andrews' Sea Mammal Research Unit, brought his years of field experience from the coast of the British Isles, subAntarctic islands, even the Caspian Sea - along with a bottle of peaty malt from Western Isles. Deceptively thin, Callan's capacity for hard work showed when he and I climbed onto our roof to shovel snow, a couple of days before we headed to sea. Ilse, a graduate student working with Sofie - tall, slender, with long, ever so slightly crinkly corn blond hair - looked like one of Tolkien's elves made flesh (but lacking pointy ears) - a walking advertisement for Dutch vegetarianism.

We stowed gear, met with the rest of the science crew, mostly folks from my new workplace. Tore (pronounced Tour-er)was boss, with a professor's position at the local university emphasizing his importance. He's the archetypal Saxon, from his reddish-brown hair, pale skin, beard and broad shoulders to his stomach, growing as befitted his importance. Tore came from a small town on an island south of Tromsø, a northern Norwegian boy who'd made it big. Lotta was Pippy Longstocking in her thirties – freckles, light blue eyes, red-gold hair, fit. Just like Pippy, she was Swedish, and like Nils Eric, a research assistant. Nils Eric was the real local – born round Tromsø, raised on a tiny farm just out of town. He was smallish for a Norwegian – about 5-9 and 175 pounds, beard turning to white, face reddened from life in Arctic winds and drinking. Completing the crew were Ivan, a computer technician from our institute, along because he was a keen hunter and so was thought to have a good eye for animals, and Bjørn (a different Bjørn from Bjørn on Svalbard), it's a common name in Norway), a grizzled old research assistant from the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen.

Kjell (pronounced sort of shell, but with a small tch at the start - tch-shell), Tore's second-in-command, was off to eastern Greenland in a photo-reconnaissance plane to run the other half of the project.

Sofie and I shared a room on the same level as Tore, who as cruise leader had a palatial cabin. Everyone else had all had separate cabins, as Lance was nowhere near full. Our room was unexpected luxury: wood panelling, room to move, a decent desk - even our own personal bathroom, complete with shower. Our cabin was on the deck that was more-or-less at water level.

The helicopter – a Squirrel - landed on its platform, had its rotors removed, and was lashed down. A few hours of stowing gear, the obligatory safety demonstrations, wending our way through the channels around Tromsø and we were off to sea.

First, we were off to Jan Mayen, the tiny volcanic island about 600 miles west of Norway, 400 miles north of Iceland, to unload fuel for Kjell's plane. Kjell's initial responsibility was to locate whelping patches, places where pregnant seals meet in their thousands to give birth. Harp seals have their pups on sea ice, and off east Greenland they're usually near the ice edge, so the exact location of whelping patches differs from year to year. Months earlier, Kjell had organized for fuel to be delivered to Nerlerit Inaat (I have no idea how to pronounce this properly, its name in English is Constable Point), home of the airstrip for Ittoqqortoomiit (nor this, Scoresbysund), the northernmost permanent settlement in east Greenland. His only other possible options for landing were Akureyri (Ak-you-airy) in northern Iceland, and Jan Mayen. The dirt strip at Jan Mayen took the Norwegian air force's C-130s, used to resupply the base there, so was long enough for Kjell's little Piper Navajo. But the island had no aviation fuel stores, so we had a line of 50-gallon drums lashed to the rails of Lance as we headed off.

As usual, most of the science crew lay in their bunks in varying degrees of discomfort for the first day or so. Only Tore always seemed immune to that initial bout of seasickness. Viking genetics, perhaps. The rest of us emerged one by one as the hours of our second day at sea stretched on. We hit a storm about half way across, so our three day steam became four. With the helicopter perched on its pad, high and exposed, the captain slowed the ship to a gentle one-knot trudge into the wind. The pilot and engineer climbed out for regular checks of the lashings. Losing the Squirrel at this point would have been embarrassing.

[read the next part of this post here]

Paper: Killer whale ecotox

2007-07-31T11:46:00.000-04:00

So a paper I coauthored has just come out:

ACCUMULATION AND TRANSFER OF CONTAMINANTS IN KILLER WHALES (ORCINUS ORCA) FROM NORWAY: INDICATIONS FOR CONTAMINANT METABOLISM.
HANS WOLKERS, PETER CORKERON, SOFIE VAN PARIJS, TIU SIMILA and BERT VAN BAVEL

Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Vol. 26, No. 8, pp. 1582–1590, 2007

I darted the whales (to get the samples) and did the stats, both of which were kinda fun.

Take home message from the paper is rather less happy: (from the paper's conclusion) "Killer whales hold the gloomy record of most-polluted European arctic mammal."

WWF, one of the project's funders, wrote Hans' second field season up - see here and here
Abstract

Blubber tissue of one subadult and eight male adult killer whales was sampled in Northern Norway in order to assess the degree and type of contaminant exposure and transfer in the herring–killer whale link of the marine food web. A comprehensive selection of contaminants was targeted, with special attention to toxaphenes and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). In addition to assessing exposure and food chain transfer, selective accumulation and metabolism issues also were addressed. Average total polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and pesticide levels were similar, approximately 25 g/g lipid, and PBDEs were approximatelyy 0.5 g/g. This makes killer whales one of the most polluted arctic animals, with levels exceeding those in polar bears. Comparing the contamination of the killer whale’s diet with the diet of high-arctic species such as white whales reveals six to more than 20 times higher levels in the killer whale diet. The difference in contaminant pattern between killer whales and their prey and the metabolic index calculated suggested that these cetaceans have a relatively high capacity to metabolize contaminants. Polychlorinated biphenyls, chlordanes, and dichlorodiphenyldichloro-ethylene (DDE) accumulate to some degree in killer whales, although toxaphenes and PBDEs might be partly broken down.

If you want a reprint, shoot me an email & I'll send it on.

Photos by Ilse van Opzeeland

A list of mistakes

2007-07-30T12:10:00.000-04:00

Our little girl turned four the other day. I see Sofie, recovered from James' birth four weeks ago, and James, eating like the golden pig he is, thriving. Caitlin's first months – actually her first couple of years – went much worse. And Sofie took over two years to recover.

Not long after Caitlin was born, the high-risk pregnancy specialist at Tromsø hospital asked me for a list of the mistakes that I saw in Sofie's treatment. I wrote over 4,000 words back. Maybe he was hoping for a lever to institute some changes. Maybe he thought it might make me feel better.

If he was aiming for change - from our later experiences, and what we've heard from others, it didn't seem to do any good. Maybe posting it will give an idea of just how badly pre-eclampsia can be handled (managed seems an inappropriate verb here).

The photo is of Sofie and Caitlin. If anyone can offer a good explanation for the petechiae on Sofie's chest, I'd be interested to hear it. It must have been something done in the few hours she was in ICU when I wasn't allowed in. Best I've heard is that it's from a Valsalva, implying (as best I can work out) that she had an abnormal heartbeat at some point.

The letter follows below the fold..............................

[SNIP]

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to raise my concerns regarding the manner in which Sofie’s treatment was handled at the University hospital of Northern Norway (UNN).

[SNIP some introductory stuff]

Obviously, medicine is not my area, so I may make some egregious mistakes in the comments that I provide below. If so, I’ll apologise up front, and trust that you will points these out to me. I have no intention of being antagonistic in what I write, but I also want to be explicit, so again, I apologise up front if my Australian bluntness appears as rudeness. I have no desire to be rude. My main reason for writing this is to help reduce the likelihood that others will go through what Sofie and I have been through, or worse.

In the time since it became obvious that Sofie was pre-eclamptic (now over a month ago), and particularly since Sofie had her seizure, I’ve read up a bit on eclampsia / pre-eclampsia / HELLP, and the papers that I’ve read are listed at the end of this letter. Where necessary I refer to them in the text. I’d be very surprised if I hadn’t missed some of the important literature, and I’m sure you can point me towards important work that I’ve missed, if necessary.

[SNIP some more introductory stuff]

You may think it appropriate to pass this letter on to other members of medical staff in the obstetrics unit for their consideration. I am very happy to leave that decision with you, and if you think it necessary, please feel free to do so.

It seems to me that Sofie having an eclamptic seizure after being diagnosed with pre-eclampsia three weeks previously means that the onus is on the director and members of medical staff of the obstetrics unit to demonstrate how this was not a case of dangerous incompetence. I’ve divided my questions into a series of dot points, broken into what I see as conceptually distinct areas.

1.
Monitoring prior to Caitlin’s birth (I think I have the time lines correct, but if I’ve made mistakes, my apologies, and I’m sure they will be corrected when checking through Sofie’s records).

a.
Sofie first was referred to hospital after a high blood pressure reading on a Friday, her week 34 day 4 (34/4). She was admitted for observation 34/5, and at that time [Dr A] (the German doctor who saw her, who I presume is a senior resident? I think I’ve got his name right) discussed delivering Caitlin relatively quickly. Sofie was discharged from hospital on the Monday (35/0). She saw medical staff (whose names I forget) on the following Wednesday and Friday, and had blood tests done on both these days. She then saw [Dr B] on the following Monday (36/0). [Dr B] discontinued blood tests. At the time, I queried why the tests were discontinued. My recollection is that the general thrust of [Dr B]’s answer was that she was a highly experienced obstetrician, and in her judgement the tests were unnecessary, as blood tests only revealed when pre-eclampsia was advanced, and breakdown products were becoming obvious. Monitoring requires a comparable time series, and discontinuing blood tests seems to me to introduce a break in the time series that requires justification. Do you consider discontinuing blood tests at this point of a patient’s monitoring a suitably risk-averse approach when treating pre-eclampsia.

b.
[Dr A] tested Sofie for hyperreflexia and clonus, but to the best that either Sofie or I can remember, he was the only person to do so prior to Sofie’s eclamptic seizure. Is our recollection correct? If so, why did other medical staff not carry out this basic, simple but potentially very informative test?

c.
A minor comment: Sofie’s illness clearly showed a two-day cycle. One day she’d be quite ill, the next day she’d be a little better, the following day she’d be a little worse than the first day. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a sine wave with a two-day period, but with a generally downward trajectory. I don’t know if this is news, or useful, but perhaps it might be some help (I’ve seen nothing on this in the reviews I’ve read).

d.
When blood tests were actually carried out, what blood tests were carried out? Were tests oriented towards assessing the possibility of HELLP syndrome carried out? I provide a series of dot points of tests for which I’d be curious to know the values. If it is unethical to provide me with these (I guess it is unethical without Sofie’s consent), we can discuss what to do about this when we meet. I’ve taken my list of tests from the Wiltin and Sibai review in Hospital Physician in February 1999. I’d done so for the following reasons [SNIP]. Sibai is clearly a player in studies of pre-eclampsia /HELLP; the timing of the paper (1999) means that it’s not so old as to be completely out of date, but not so new that people could not be aware of it; the journal is not obscure; what’s provided in the review is more or less a recipe for blood tests for HELLP diagnosis. So, what were the results over time for Sofie’s levels of :

Bilirubin
Lactate dehydrogenase
Serum aspartate amino transferase
Lactate dehydrogenase [yes, a typo, I know]
Platelet count?

And did she have abnormal peripheral smears at any time?

e.
At least twice, it has been suggested to me that Sofie’s pre-eclampsia was not “severe”. This is given in justification for the delay in inducing Sofie. How can this definition of not “severe” be rationalised as a reason to not proceed with induction earlier than it was? I’m not talking about the day before Sofie was induced; I’m talking about from 37/0 or appreciably earlier. If it is because Sofie’s blood pressure was not sufficiently high, then the implication is that “severe” pre-eclampsia occurs only when blood pressure cannot be kept under control with medication (which is not a definition that I’ve seen written anywhere, if it exists in the refereed literature I’d be interested to see it). I recollect seeing at least one systolic blood pressure reading of Sofie’s of over 170 anyway. So, even though on medication for hypertension, Sofie had a blood pressure that went over 170 systolic at least once, and over 110 diastolic more than once as I recall (if my recollection is incorrect, I’m happy to be corrected). She also had headaches, complained of visual disturbances to nursing staff at least once, and had some photophobia at least once that I can recall (although no-one ever asked us about that). Also, Caitlin demonstrated an abnormal (retarded) pattern of foetal growth in the latter stages of Sofie’s pregnancy. (As I’m sure you are aware, foetal size estimates that fall inside the 95% confidence intervals of a nonlinear regression of foetal growth are not necessarily the same as normal foetal growth). How is this not “severe” pre-eclampsia?

f.
The UK eclampsia study reported by Douglas and Redman (1994) makes it obvious that there is not necessarily a linear (or predictably nonlinear) relationship between “severity” of pre-eclampsia and likelihood of an eclamptic seizure occurring in all cases. The study does not make clear that failing to deliver a patient (who is past 34 weeks) whose pre-eclampsia is clearly getting progressively worse is in some way not increasing the risk to both mother and foetus. I haven’t seen anything in the literature that I’ve read to suggest this, but if it exists, I’d be happy to view the paper(s). There is a logical difference between attempting to manage for an eclamptic seizure that comes with no warning (Broughton Pipkin’s (1995) thunderbolt) and allowing a case of pre-eclampsia to continue several weeks after initial diagnosis and when past 34 weeks of pregnancy. In the first (the thunderbolt), the likelihood function of mortality or morbidity over time is unpredictable (perhaps chaotic), in the second; the likelihood function is almost certainly exponential.

g.
It has been argued to me twice now that what goes on with pre-eclampsia is a matter of risk management (although not necessarily put in exactly those terms). I accept this. However, I haven’t seen anywhere in the literature that suggests a suitably risk-averse approach is to stop monitoring via blood tests, nor to allow a patient to progress to the point where even to the untrained eye (and nose) can detect that she has become seriously ill (see 2b, below) before starting induction. To then stop induction for reasons that seem to relate more to what staff felt like doing than for the best interests of the patient also does not seem acceptably risk averse to me.

2.
Just before Caitlin’s birth

a.
I know that we have discussed that induction was stopped on Friday, but there’s an issue of process that I would like to raise. You are the high-risk pregnancy specialist for the unit, yet your decision (direction? order?) to induce was overridden. How was this decision to override reached, and who was responsible for the decision? It seems to me that the process by which your decision was overridden must be investigated. Whoever made the decision should have the point clarified that it is not only the decision, but the process by which the decision was reached, must be rectified in the future. That is, it seems to me that it’s not just that the induction was delayed, its how the induction was delayed that is important. I realise this is more of an issue for the director of the obstetrics unit at UNN, but as you’re the high-risk pregnancy expert, this may create more problems for you in the future also.

b.
On the Friday morning that initial induction was started, I could tell that Sofie was clearly extremely ill. Her perfusion (clear in her eyelids) and her smell indicated to me that she was much more ill than she had been previously. If I, with no training other than first aid can pick this, how was it missed so badly by nursing or medical staff that induction was ceased on that day?

c.
I left Sofie round 2100 (I think) on the Saturday evening when she was induced. Sofie tells me that she was left alone for much of the night (I arrived just before 0500 on the Sunday morning, after she called me). Over those roughly 8 hours, Sofie spent time in her room with only another patient, or in the corridor alone, and when she went to the toilet she locked the door, as no-one told her not to do so. She was not under constant surveillance by medical or nursing staff during this time. I believe that this is appallingly poor management of her over this period, given the risk of eclamptic seizure that she faced over that time. Had she been struck by an eclamptic seizure during the night, I suspect that a coroner’s inquest would agree with me. I believe that you must be made aware of this, as this seems to me to be a blunder that must never occur again.

3.
In the few hours after Caitlin’s birth

I’ll preface these comments with a couple of quotes from Walker’s (2000) review: “Delivery is the ultimate cure for pre-eclampsia, but most maternal deaths occur post-partum”; and “Continued close monitoring is required after delivery”, both on page 1264. I believe that Sofie’s monitoring post-partum was demonstrably inadequate, for the following reasons:

a.
In the time from when I arrived at around 0500 until Sofie had her seizure sometime around 1500-1600, [Dr B] visited Sofie on one occasion, to check the swelling of her right labia (labium?). Given the risks associated with inducing Sofie as late as she was, and the need for close monitoring stressed in the literature, why was no doctor present at birth and on a regular basis for the hours thereafter? If the answer is a lack of staff, this would imply that future cases of pre-eclampsia must be dealt with in a manner that is more risk-averse for the mother.

b.
Sofie had no injuries from falling as a result of her seizure. This is due to me. When Sofie got out of bed, I always accompanied her, not because anyone told me to, but because it seemed sensible to me. When Sofie started shaking prior to going stiff as a board, I recognised that she was having an eclamptic seizure, supported her as she fell, and then laid her on the ground as she started convulsing. [Nurse C], the nurse who was then responsible for observing Sofie, responded magnificently to what was going on, organised a diazepam injection instantly, and instructed Sofie’s mother to hit the call button. [Nurse C] was (in my opinion) the best nurse who cared for Sofie during her time at UNN, and I am very glad that she was present when Sofie had the seizure. I am left with a rather unpleasant memory of Sofie having a seizure in my arms. For me, this is a very small price to pay for knowing that, thanks to me, Sofie did not suffer greater injury than from the seizure itself. The issue here is that reliance of a patient’s partner to perform initial first aid for a life-threatening illness is rather unusual hospital policy.

c.
We have discussed in general why magnesium sulphate was not used, but I still question the wisdom of not considering magnesium sulphate prophylaxis post-partum, particularly when Sofie did not urinate for several hours after giving birth. If the answer is “it’s not done in Norway”, this implies that magnesium sulphate prophylaxis s not permissible in Norwegian hospitals under circumstances when a woman is at extreme risk of eclampsia. If I am correct and this was coupled with poor early monitoring, inadequate monitoring during birth, and not delivering a pre-eclamptic patient until 37/6, then this seems to me to be a rather odd approach to providing medical care. If the argument is that patients on magnesium sulphate prophylaxis require monitoring in an intensive care unit (ICU) - well, in this case, the ICU was almost empty that day, so why not send her there? If the manner in which Sofie was treated is indicative of how dangerously pre-eclamptic women are treated at UNN, then more women are going to end up in ICU on magnesium sulphate– why not get them there before, rather than after, an eclamptic seizure?

4.
Sofie’s care in the ICU.
I have one issue regarding this, for your information, as you’re the high-risk pregnancy specialist and this may be useful background for you.

a.
The nurse who was on duty over night did not seem particularly concerned when Sofie’s monitor alarm went off. I recall three occasions when the monitor alarm went of multiple times. My recollection may be slightly amiss (that Sunday wasn’t the easiest day I’d ever had, and my memory might be a bit off). What was happening was that the magnesium sulphate was affecting Sofie’s heartbeat in such a way that her pulse doubled on the monitor. After the second set of alarms (or perhaps the third), the night nurse summoned the intensivist, who reduced Sofie’s dose of magnesium sulphate. I had to request the night nurse to check Sofie at least once during a series of alarms. On at least one occasion, the night nurse’s solution to Sofie’s raised pulse rate was to wake her, apparently assuming that her pulse was racing from a bad dream. I certainly did not get the impression that he understood that magnesium sulphate affected the heart, and that this can, on rare occasions, lead to the death of a patient. Had I been aware of this possibility at the time, I would have insisted on the intensivist checking Sofie each time that there was a series monitor alarms. Is it acceptable that a patient’s partner should get the ICU night nurse to investigate why a monitor alarm is going off? If the night nurse really did not understand the need to keep an eye on a patient’s cardiac output when the patient is on magnesium sulphate, is that nurse really competent to be working in an ICU? Perhaps this makes the reasons for my comment to your students about t-wave abnormalities and magnesium sulphate a little clearer.

5.
After Sofie’s time in ICU
These issues are less crucial (that is, they were probably not life threatening), but they should be raised.

a.
As you are aware, Sofie had a labial haematoma from delivery. [Dr B] investigated the swelling just after delivery and, as I recall, said at the time that it was not a haematoma, but was oedema. A few hours after leaving ICU, Sofie had a lot of pain when attempting to urinate (to the point where she could not urinate, and so reduced her fluid intake to compensate), and could feel that her labia was swollen. This caused her considerable pain and mental distress. It was approximately 11 hours after leaving ICU before a doctor saw Sofie, after I had made multiple requests to the nursing staff for a doctor to check her condition. The nursing staff started putting ice packs on the haematoma a while after Sofie initially complained of her pain. I see several issues associated with this episode where it seems to me that things could have been done better.

i.
As I recall, [Dr B] initially misdiagnosed the haematoma as oedema. This, of itself, is probably not a big deal (although it does little to reassure me regarding her competence). Clearly there were many deliveries that Sunday, and I am sure that [Dr B] was very busy. However, given that Sofie developed (or had) HELLP syndrome, her low platelets were bound to make the haematoma worse than it might otherwise have been. Therefore, it seems sloppy to me that no member of medical staff instructed that the oedema / haematoma be checked at some stage.

ii.
Further to this, it was Sofie who had to point out that she had this problem. This is despite her recent move from ICU, and a guarantee that she would receive close monitoring, and had a predictable problem (see (i) above). Is this taking monitoring seriously enough?

iii.
Controlling Sofie’s blood pressure was clearly a major issue after she emerged from ICU. The (predictable) pain that she suffered from the haematoma is likely to have affected her blood pressure, isn’t it?

iv.
The same argument (as for iii) can be made for her mental distress arising from the haematoma.

v.
It was something in the order of 7 hours from when Sofie first called a nurse to express her considerable pain until she saw a doctor. To me, this does not seem to fit the description of “close monitoring”. If the labour ward lacked the medical staff to deal with Sofie’s case, why wasn’t she left in ICU? They had the bed space there. I realise that this is not your responsibility, but if you’re the one dealing with high-risk pregnancies, then this issue will arise for you again.

b.
Monitoring of Sofie’s blood pressure after her discharge from ICU was carried out extremely poorly. Again, this is really an issue for the director of your unit (I think), but you’re the person who deals with high-risk cases, when this matters the most. The incident not long before Sofie was discharged, when her blood pressure was recorded as 176/116 is the outstanding example of a systemic problem in the unit. Sofie’s blood pressure (if the measurement was to be believed) rose back up to where it was a trigger for watching for “severe” pre-eclampsia. As it is possible (albeit unlikely) that Sofie could have had a seizure more than a week after giving birth, it appears that this reading was treated in an extremely cavalier fashion.

i.
Is it acceptable that, after the measure was made, Sofie made what was functionally a clinical self-diagnosis and decided that the measure must be wrong?

ii.
Is it acceptable that I had to point out that the reading needed doing again using a mercury sphygmomanometer?

iii.
Was it acceptable that the duty doctor did not think to query the manner in which the blood pressure was measured, rather than have Sofie and I do his or her job?

iv.
What was the duty doctor doing that was so important that he or she had to issue instructions by telephone, rather than personally visit Sofie? It should be possible to extract this information from the records for that evening. (This is not a rhetorical question).

c.
Following from (b) above, there are important issues here regarding monitoring in general for the unit (again, back to the point about you being the high-risk specialist). I know a lot about monitoring, albeit in the context of time series of estimates of animal abundance. Without going into detail (which I can do if you want), an unreliable data point is worse than no data point at all when monitoring. I’m sure you’re aware of this, but the importance of this seems to need to be stressed to medical and nursing staff in the unit.

6.
Generalities
There are some generalities that I think need to be raised as well. Yet again, these may be issues for the unit director, but as you’re the high-risk pregnancy specialist these may be bigger problems for you than for anyone else in the unit.

a.
[Dr A's] decision to induce Sofie as early as possible after 35/0 (which seems to have been his decision?) was rescinded. Given what followed, revoking this decision looks like a bad judgement call on someone’s part. It seems to me to be worth checking the process by which this decision was revoked. It may be possible to determine if there are ways in which this decision-making process can be improved. This may be really important.

b.
I was struck by the way in which many of the nursing staff seems to be looking for resolution of listed symptoms rather than of an illness itself. For example, some nurses would take a series of blood pressure measurements until they got one that they were happy enough with, and go with that measurement. When Sofie could not urinate post-partum, she was encouraged to force herself to urinate, as urination, supposedly, would indicate that her risk of eclamptic seizure was reduced. Although it was not put as explicitly as that, Sofie was encouraged to make an effort to urinate, as if by urinating slightly, the risk of eclampsia would vanish. To me, this indicates a mindset that concentrates on listed symptoms, rather than that real indicators that risk associated the physiological process of concern were diminishing. I suspect that this problem is pretty common in hospitals around the world. My other guess is that you’re only too familiar with what I’m talking about, but if someone like me, with no medical training, can see it, then perhaps its worth someone like me pointing it out.

c.
There’s a final big picture issue regarding multiple doctors seeing a patient (that again, of which I guess you’re only too aware): who is responsible for the problems that I’ve described? This assumes that I have a reasonable case regarding at least some of the questions / comments above. Some issues seem systemic and so a matter for the director of the unit, some seem issues that individual medical staff need to consider. Obviously, I don’t have any answers on this (other than that I presume there are legal precedents in Norway that provide direction)- I just think I should raise this issue.

7.
In your opinion, in how many of the dot points above do I need to be correct before my unhappiness with the manner in which Sofie was treated can be described as reasonable? It would seem to me that for some of them (e.g. 1d,e; 2c; 3b; 4a), the answer is one only, but then perhaps I’m biased.

Finally, I’d like to thank you for the manner in which you treated Sofie.

SNIP

Yours sincerely
[SNIP]

References I’ve read through (for your information)

Broughton Pipkin, F. 1995. The hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. British Medical Journal 311: 609-613.

Dekker, G. and Sibai, B. 2001. Primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of pre-eclampsia. The Lancet 357:209-215.

Douglas, K.A. and Redman, C.W.G. 1994. Eclampsia in the United Kingdom. British Medical Journal 309: 1395-1400.

Higgins, J.R. and de Swiet, M. 2001. Blood-pressure easurement and classificationin pregnancy. The Lancet 357: 131-135.

Magee, L.A., Ornstein, M.P. and von Dadelszen. 1999. Management of hypertension in pregnancy. British Medical Journal 318: 1332-1336.

O’Hara Padden, M. 1999. HELLP Syndrome: recognition and perinatal management. American Family Physician. .September 1999, downloaded from: http://www.aafp.org/afp/990901ap/829.html.

Witlin, A.G. and Sibai, B. 1999. Diagnosis and management of women with Hemolysis, Elevated Liver Enzymes, and Low Platelet Count (HELLP) Syndrome. Hospital Physician February 1999; 40-49.

Walker, J.J. 2000. Pre-eclampsia. British Medical Journal 356: 1260-1265.

Waterstone, M., Bewley, S. and Wolfe, C. 2001. Incidence and predictors of severe obstetric morbidity: case-control study. British Medical Journal 322: 1089-1094.

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part VIII

2007-07-30T10:58:00.000-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here]
We were spending more time stuck in town. The landfast ice was clearing, but bits of the Arctic pack were finding their way into the fjord. Chunks of pack ice, having had a couple of years to accumulate, are bigger than the months-old pieces of landfast ice. Small bergs, and worse, giant rafts of bergy bits, were appearing. Visually, this could be brilliant. One small berg grounded itself by the harbour wall. For the few days it sat, we'd buzz by close as possible. Light reflected off the berg, veins of turquoise-ripple ice.

But even worn-out leftovers of pack ice demand respect. On what proved to be our last visit to our scarred seal, we rounded Blomstrandhalvøya to find a field of bergy bits between us and Ny Ålesund. About half way back, our progress was blocked. The wind was picking up. And we could see more ice moving into the fjord. We motored up to near the edge of the ice field, Sofie started picking our way though, standing in the bow, looking through binoculars. By now, I'd some experience bashing mini-berg with the Buster. The trick lay in knowing how hard I could hit a berg, and how far up onto it I could drive the boat, without risking tipping over to the point where Sofie might fall out. Although nowhere near Christian's league, I gave some chunks the Christian treatment to get through to the next stretch of open water. We came to a couple of cul-de-sacs, surrounded by biggish pans of ice, needing bashing a little more than we'd like. Open water to Ny Ålesund finally appeared.

It was a long trip back.

May was nearly over, and Sofie still needed a few more recordings from males she knew. Our scarred male by Blomstrand was always accessible, but some other recording stations were becoming problematic. Broken pack ice was now entering the fjord daily, making anticlockwise transits in the currents. We'd spend long minutes shoving through ice to get near our recording stations. At one station, as close as we could get the fast ice edge was still a hundred yards or so from where we really needed to be. It felt like ages passed, navigating in through broken chunks of old pack, with a fair bit of shoving needed. After almost a month on the water, I was getting braver.

So we sat, Sofie went through her ritual of extracting the recorder from her fleece beneath her floater suit, hydrophone insertion, recorder on, notebook annotations. With no chance to do behavioural observations, so I grabbed the thermos, started pouring coffee. There was no wind, so we were making the most of one of our last possible days out. Broken chunks of pack were heading our way, adding to what we'd just pushed through. It seemed we had some time, but in the seconds I poured coffee, we were completely surrounded. No open water around our little boat (with tiddler engine!) at all. We looked at each other. We looked at the ice.

“Um – hon”, I said, “How much do you want this recording?”.

Sofie looked around again, bit her lower lip, “Not that much. This is really coming in. Shit.”.

“Yeah”. I sighed. “Okay, let's go”.

She coiled the hydrophone cable into its case, pulled the hydrophone from the water. “Okay, it's up” she said. We'd developed a habit of waiting until the hydrophone was clear of the water before starting the engine – we didn't want to risk cutting the hydrophone cable with the propeller. “I'll sort stuff out as we go”.

While she'd been retrieving the hydrophone, I'd been standing, looking for the best way out. I turned, grabbed the pullcord. “You clear?” I asked.

“Yep.”. Another little ritual – anyone who's ever been hit by the fist of someone pull-starting an outboard in a small boat will understand this one.

“You right?” A final ritual, I'd always check that Sofie was settled before knocking the outboard into gear. Starting to move a boat when someone's not ready is the easiest way to send them overboard.

“Yep. I've got your coffee”.

I clicked the outboard into gear, idled off towards a promising looking opening in the ice. Sofie handed me a coffee, wiped the hydrophone dry, put away her notebook, tucked the recorder back inside her floater suit. Then she grabbed the section of rope we'd tied to the bow for a handhold, stood, started pointing our way out between slurps of her coffee. We bumped our way through.

The open water to Ny Ålesund looked good when we found it.

That was one of our last trips on the little Buster. On land, ice was melting. Browns were replacing the whites of winter. Arctic terns started arriving, heralding warmer weather.

Apparently, summer in Ny Ålesund means more scientists. Cruise ships disgorge tourist hordes. See the Scientists At Work in the Arctic, Researching our Impact on the Environment! How much carbon does each tourist burn, coming to see what they're helping destroy? And the Arctic terns, who start arriving at the end of May, are obnoxious, pecking everyone on the head. What a mix.

Luckily for me, it's also when bearded seals stop calling, so Sofie's fieldwork was over.

On our way back to Australia, we stayed a couple of days in Tromsø, at the Polar Institute's flat for visiting scientists. It was the end of May, and the snow around town was more than head high. I had an interview for a position – seal population biologist - that had come up at the Norwegian Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture Research.

The next year, Christian shot a few of the male bearded seals in Kongsfjord, part of the Polar Institute's research program.

In May 2006, there was no landfast ice in Kongsfjord.

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part VII. Bear in Town

2007-07-29T18:59:00.000-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here.]
In our wandering around town, we met Wolf, one of Ny Ålesund's four dogs. Their little cluster of kennels, just outside town, was surrounded by a wire fence about 10 feet high. The dogs were kept on chains as well, as Ny Ålesund's migratory bird population wouldn't have taken kindly to visits to their nests during the breeding season. Of the four dogs, one called Wolf was the most sociable, seen on walks around town with his human. Wolf wasn't a particularly big dog, mostly white – kind of a scruffy Samoyed look about to him. He seemed to delight in his role as the only animal in town who was available for petting.

The dogs' kennels were in a ragged lean-to at the enclosure's edge. Once samples had been taken from the dead seals, Bjørn dragged their carcasses to the dogs' enclosure, stacked them on the back of the lean-to, outside the wire. He didn't want to see the dead animals go to waste, and so dropped them off for dog food.

The carcasses lay, a small, sad, frozen brown lump, about four feet above the ground, open for all to see. I heard a few mutterings by other scientists, expressing their disapproval – most were disgusted with the shooting-for-science. And the meat left in the open was seen as an invitation to bears – and Bjørn was blamed for that, too, even though he'd just left it there for the dogs' owners to sort out.

Sure enough. One sunny lunchtime, Sofie and I strolled back to the canteen, from a recording session at the harbour wall. Meals at Ny Ålesund are provided by the Kings Bay company. The canteen was a large glasshouse with a view over the fjord to the Three Crowns, mountain peaks to the east. The spectacular building was new – part of an ongoing programme to refurbish the facilities at Ny Ålesund. Norway is keen to demonstrate its ownership of the Svalbard archipelago, and with oil money pouring in (only Luxembourg has a higher per capita gross domestic product), the government can afford to splurge on beautiful new buildings. Our meals mostly involved drinking in the view while talking science with whoever else was eating at the time.

This lunch was different. A call of “bear” saw most diners leave their meals and mob the windows. A young male polar bear ambled along the shoreline, heading east. His path took him a little way above the high tide mark, well seaward of most buildings. Everyone stopped eating for ten minutes or so until he'd moved out of sight.

It still strikes me as bizarre that my first view of a polar bear was from a canteen.

After eating, Sofie and I dropped into the Polar Institute building to check email before heading back down to the harbour wall. A message on the blackboard read – WARNING. POLAR BEAR IN TOWN. PLEASE TAKE YOUR PRECAUTIONS. Unlike most animals, polar bears will attack people without provocation. The bears that end up wandering around settlements are usually juveniles, particularly males, trying to find their way in the world. Older, more sensible adults, know that avoiding people in a smart idea if you're a big, toothy carnivore. All the youngsters see is the opportunity for a free feed – they've yet to learn that there's no such thing.

Sofie picked up the rifle, stashed some bullets in the pocket of her scooter suit. I grabbed our flare pistol and a few flares, and we wandered down to the harbour wall. This time, we paid much more attention to our surroundings as we strolled the couple of hundred yards between the last building in town and the harbour. We'd be stuck without shelter if the bear emerged.

Besides, “strolled” doesn't really do justice to the way I negotiated the numerous patches of ice on the walk – especially the stretch after the last building. Tottered, wobbled, slid, would be more accurate. Given the old joke abut not having to run faster than a bear, just faster than your companion, Sofie was pretty safe with me around.

Anyway, we didn't see the bear. We did see the bear's footprints crossing ours on the road, just off the harbour wall. He must have missed us by a few minutes when we'd walked up to lunch.

The bear had discovered the cache of seal popsicles by the dogs' enclosure and was helping himself to them. He must have thought he'd stumbled into polar bear nirvana, so he decided to hang around. But his decision to settle in around Ny Ålesund's outskirts presented a few problems.

Wandering around town with a rifle, it soon became clear why folks with long experience working in Svalbard brought their own hand guns. Christian had an immaculate .44 magnum made entirely of stainless steel - something any sensible mammal would run away from on sight. Another Norwegian scientist walked around with a semi-automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his scooter suit. Their easy familiarity with firearms contrasted with that of some other scientists, most famously the young British woman who the previous year had accidentally discharged a rifle inside a hut (luckily upwards, through a roof). I was a little uneasy that there might be folks in town with similar abilities, though having a loaded firearm inside Ny Ålesund's town limits is forbidden.

Another difference was also clear. Many scientists around Ny Ålesund were unhappy that Bjørn had shot the seals at all, and the pile of seal carcasses acted as a constant reminder. The Norwegians who staffed the base were far more blasé. Norway's one of the only nations where scientists are allowed to (and arguably, encouraged to) kill marine mammals for scientific purposes. Bjørn's work – although as he was just KitnChristian's research assistant, so it was really their work – was viewed with disgust by many.

[This photo is of chunks of bearded seals, taken by Sofie the previous year.]
I felt uncomfortable, as I didn't approve of the killing, but didn't want to speak ill of Bjørn. It was worse for Sofie, who'd been with Bjørn when he was shooting the seals but who didn't like it either. This was her second field season with the Norwegian Polar Institute at Ny Ålesund, and she was part of KitnChristian's team, and so was seen as one of the Norwegians by most folks. But as a couple, Sofie and I were an entity just separate enough from the Norwegians that some could – and did - let us know just what they thought.

After a couple of days, the whole bear-in-town issue came to a head.

Around three o'clock one morning, we awoke to dogs barking, then howling, people yelling. Eventually, along with everyone else, we dragged ourselves up, pulled on scooter suits, grabbed the rifle and some bullets, the flare pistol and some flares, and wandered out to see what was happening. Twenty-four hour daylight meant not feeling like it was the wee hours of the morning, and walking in sunlight that could have been any time of day.

The commotion was at the dog's enclosure. Three or four people were attempting to scare the bear away. By the time we wandered out, they'd started firing flares at the ground in front of the bear. Little gouts of coloured flame popped off, the bear ambled away. We returned to bed.

The flare pistols were the weapons of first choice to frighten polar bears away. As with all of the larger mammals on Svalbard, centuries of hunting almost wiped them out. An international agreement to conserve polar bears in 1973 saw hunts banned in Norwegian territory. Bear numbers are increasing now, although exactly how many there are is still unknown (the Polar Institute has a current project to address this). Bears are a risk on Svalbard – a young woman was killed by one near Longyearbyen in 2002. But shooting a bear in self-defence is the option of last resort, which is why we'd been issued with a flare pistol as well as a rifle.

I'd been intrigued to see just how well a few flares would frighten a bear. They certainly worked. He never returned.

Wolf had been the only dog mauled during the incident. There was a huge bend in the enclosure's wire where the bear had climbed in. Quite how Wolf, not a particularly large dog, had managed to fight off a polar bear while still chained up, remains a mystery. He had some nasty cuts, but was remarkably chipper, all things considered. He wallowed in being the town hero while his wounds healed. Sled dogs are tough.

Bjørn was seriously in the doghouse. His pile of seal carcasses were now a reminder of what had kept the bear around. To many, he was responsible for what happened, including risking the bear's life and everyone's favourite dog. Many – probably most - scientists in Ny Ålesund work on environmental monitoring projects. Intelligent people who study environmental issues do so because they care about the world. Most tend not to be fans of killing animals in the name of science, especially in an area that's supposedly protected. Bjørn was decidedly unpopular.

Bjørn had other problems too – he'd been struggling to keep working with the pain of his back injury. Just after the bear incident, his back became too much and he had to head back to Tromsø for medical care. The miasma of ill-will seemed to fly away with him.

[Read the final part of this post here.]

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part VI

2007-07-27T15:52:00.001-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here.]

Running marine research from tiny boats in remote places usually doesn't go smoothly, so it's always wise to have a Plan B. Preferably something that involves working from shore.

Do male bearded seals call 24 hours a day? Are there times of day when they call more than others? To answer questions on temporal patterning, Sofie set up a program of recording 15 minutes every hour over either 12 or 24 hours every third day. As we couldn't go out on the boat to do this – too many days missed due to bad weather – she recorded from the harbour wall. A little hut there meant we could keep warm while recording. A five minute walk from the Polar Hotel to the harbour wall, press record, and we were doing science. We'd take it in turns to sneak out for the recordings in the small hours of the morning, leaving the other warm and (in my case) snoring.
To localize individual seals from their calls, Sofie used a simple but elegant little system. She'd set three hydrophones from the harbour wall. At the start of each recording period, she'd carefully place the hydrophones in a predetermined position, then run their cables back to the hut. All three hydrophones connected to a multitrack cassette tape recorder.

The theory behind localization is pretty simple. A seal calls underwater, the sound travels through the water to the hydrophones. The nearest hydrophone detects the call first, the most distant hears it last. Knowing the speed of sound through water, it's then a matter of triangulation to work out where the seal was when it called. Friends from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had written computer programs to do the triangulation automatically, making Sofie's life a lot easier than it could have been.

The precision of this system depends on a few factors – how far away the seal is and the distance between the hydrophones probably being the most important. Still, for male seals calling underwater, even a rough idea of where they are is better than nothing. The hydrophones were spaced about 40 yards apart, and it's about two and a half miles from the harbour wall to the nearest point on Blomstrandhalvøya. So we needed to know just how rough Sofie's rough triangulation was.

To resolve this, we calibrated the array. One calm day near the end of May, I popped out in the Buster by myself, while Sofie recorded from the hut. Sofie had calculated a grid of 30 positions and input them to our handheld GPS. I puttered around in the Buster, going to each position, then implementing our highly technical calibration system – banging on the side of the boat with a hammer. There was only time for a couple of quick bangs at each position, given the current in the fjord. We coordinated this highly technical process by radio. Using these bangs, and cross checking our little GPS with equipment available at the research station, Sofie worked out that the array was precise to under five yards at best (very close to the harbour wall), and out by roughly 200 yards at two miles. Good enough to track seals in Kongsfjord.

As it turns out, some males hold small territories within which they display, but others roam the length of Kongsfjord, calling. Maybe they're looking for an in to their own patch? And from our work from the Buster, observing males we could identify, Sofie could identify individual males by their calls. She eventually showed that some individual males had called in the same parts of Kongsfjord over two years. They probably held the same residences over several years, but we'll never know that now.

Read the next part of this post here.

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part V

2007-07-27T15:45:00.000-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here.]

So we had to be more careful with weather and ice conditions, meaning we spent more time in Ny Ålesund. It's an extreme place, as the 24 hour daylight in early May demonstrated. Geography is constantly reinforced by reference to the World's Northernmost things there. The World's Northernmost Post Office. The World's Northernmost Pub. The World's Northernmost Webcam. The World's Northernmost Historical Train, a relic of coal mining. In the World's Northernmost Gym, the World's Northernmost Climbing Wall. Ultima Thule as tourist kitsch.

But the truly weird thing about Ny Ålesund is how it feels like just another Norwegian village. Maybe a little friendlier, sprightlier, but in many ways, life there is disconcertingly normal. There's a shop where you can buy alcohol and souvenirs. A sauna, where Sofie and Kit would disappear for what seemed like hours on end. Norwegian-hotel-standard meals three times daily at the canteen. Remarkably fresh salads.
Doing fieldwork in 24 hour daylight meant that the main way we kept track of time was in order to make mealtimes.

Most scientists stayed in barracks. As we were a couple, Sofie and I got a room in the North Pole Hotel, established from a converted barracks just prior to World War II (Arctic tourism isn't new). A constant in Scandinavian life is that everyone takes off their footwear on entering a building. Trudging around in heavy, snowy boots, the rationale for this immediately obvious.

When we first entered our room at the hotel, Sofie stepped into the bathroom.

“Ooh, you've got to come in here. Try this, try this”, she said.

She squirmed out of the way to let me through (it was not a large bathroom).

“Yeah, what?”

“Your feet – feel?”

I wiggled my feet, looked down, looked back at her.

“Heated floor”, Sofie said.

“Ahh”. Realization dawned.

I'd been told of this most civilized of Scandinavian luxuries, bathrooms with underfloor heating. Maybe we were closer to the North Pole than we were ever likely to be again, but we certainly weren't roughing it.

Civilization at Ny Ålesund revealed itself in other ways, too.

There was occasional socializing with other scientists. Sofie and I had one evening's dinner party at the joint French-German research station - the beautiful little Blue House - with the only other scientists out on the water, a German team diving from their Zodiac inflatables. Dinner included the home videos - their underwater footage included a bearded seal mugging their camera, investigating them, to a background soundtrack of trills. Another evening was at KitnChristian's cabin, experiencing Kit's ability to whip up culinary masterpieces from nothing, marvelling at Christan's ability to absorb vast quantities of alcohol with no apparent effect.

We also had to stay around town every third day, working on Sofie's second project.

[Read the next part of this post here.]

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part IV.

2007-07-23T10:38:00.000-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here.]

Sofie and I got the smallest Buster, 14 feet long with a 25 horsepower outboard. Most mornings, we'd check the weather, and if things looked promising, we'd load it with acoustic gear, day pack, check the anchor, radio, flare pistol and rifle, head out into the fjord.

Sofie was studying the way that male bearded seals behaved during the mating season, and in particular, the sounds they used. Females don't call underwater during the mating season, but males do. Are the calls to attract females, defend territories, or a mix of both? Could individual seals be identified by something unique about their calls? Did individual males hold territories through the breeding season? Was there something about their diving and calling behaviour to suggest that one seal was more likely to be successful at mating than another?

Biologists, especially animal behaviourists, seem obsessed with sex. Sofie's specialty was using acoustics to understand the calls and movements of male seals that mate underwater. Although several seal species do this, this aspect of seals' lives has remained a mystery until recently. Improvements in the technology needed to study them – particularly being able to process their calls on a desktop computer - is revolutionizing our understanding of these “aquatic mating” seals. Sofie's PhD work on harbour seals in Scotland was one of the pioneering studies in the area, and she'd won a postdoctoral fellowship to work with Kit in Svalbard.

Her work was just another small piece of pure science – improving our understanding of the other animals with whom we share this planet, and providing some more insight into the evolution of animal behaviour. Most of my work has been applied ecology – using the scientific method to understand how we humans affect the lives of animals. On this project, rather than running the show, overseeing grad students, balancing the budgets, I was just along to help out. The lack of responsibility (other than keeping the boat upright) meant the trip felt like a holiday.

And bearded seals are one animal that could use more pure science. Too big for most scientists to contemplate just grabbing, and with a preference for smallish ice floes, they're unusually hard to catch, even for Arctic seals. KitnChristian's studies of the movements and diving behaviour of pups were among the first anywhere. Trying to tranquillize or sedate bearded seals is very risky. As they're on small pieces of ice, they're likely to slip into the water before the drugs take effect, and once drugged, they'd drown. So they need a direct approach. And most scientists couldn't contemplate doing what Christian and Bjørn would – leaping across ice floes to tackle 70 pounds of wriggling, slippery pup, or scooping a pup up with an oversized butterfly net, straight out of the water (most of us just aren't that strong). After a couple of weeks' catching, it caught up with Bjørn, who hurt his back with one pup. Only Christian seemed indestructible – he'd even grab the occasional mother when he got the chance, all four hundred uncooperative pounds of her.

So bearded seals remain among the least understood mammals of the Arctic. Aquatic mating means that watching males and females isn't much of an option. Hence Sofie's reliance on sound.

We'd motor out, find seals, record their sounds, observe their behaviour. We wore immersion suits, large, hooded coveralls of orange rubber. They're not the most comfortable items of clothing, nor the easiest things to get on and off. Their huge front zippers had to be lubricated regularly. I could get a reasonable amount of clothing on underneath – thermal underwear, at least one fleece sweater, fleece pants – there was no way to get enough socks on for me to be comfortable about my feet. The immersion suits had boots attached, which made sense were I to fall in the water. But the boots were of thinnish rubber, and constricted at the ankle, so I could only wear one pair of socks with them.

And it was cold. For most of our month in Ny Ålesund, the temperatures were around -10 Celsius. I'd started driving small boats as a teenager, and as I had more experience with small boats than Sofie, I drove. So I couldn't turn my face away from the wind. In the bow, facing backwards, she could huddle against the breeze and stay a little warmer. Despite a balaclava, fleece neck warmer, two hats and ski goggles, the exposed bits of my face were pretty chilly by the time we'd stop at one of our recording stations. Kongsfjord is deep, so there's no worries with hitting rocks, but bergy bits of ice, particularly when there was a bit of chop on the water, were a worry.

Once, I ran over one – the Buster lifted, tipped hard onto its left side. Busters are unusual boats, as they're really deeply veed (which is why they're so good for shoving ice around), but then have substantial reserve buoyancy in the very top of their sides. So they'll tip over much further than normal boats, but not topple right over. This is okay once you get used to it, but I suspect there are better ways of finding these things out than accidentally running into a boat-sized chunk of ice in choppy sea in the middle of an Arctic fjord. So we had a long, long – aaaaaahhhh faaaaaaaaaaaarrrkkkkck – moment (lasting somewhat longer than it takes to say). Disconcerting really, watching salt water much too close and at way too weird an angle, on a little boat sliding sideways and up, then down, on a mostly-submerged chunk of ice floe. Finally the Buster righted as we slid off.

Sofie hung on tight, gave me one of those looks, said, “Uhh - want to watch where we're going?”. Running into a baby-berg - it's one of those thing you only do once.

But for the first few times out, it wasn't my cold face that worried me. As we were sitting still, lest we disturb our seal, my toes gradually lost all feeling. Constant wriggling them inside my boots didn't help much. Our first time out, after I hadn't been able to feel my toes for about an hour, I thought it worth mentioning to Sofie. After all, she had a season's more Arctic experience. She told me not to worry (her toes got cold faster than mine did, I learned later). Despite her assurances, I kept imagining our return, my toes as small ice-white crunkles, about to erupt into those awesome purple blisters. Dag's frostbite had made an impression.

I still have all my toes. Sofie was right, I got used to not feeling them.

One bit of real fun with the Buster was driving through grey ice. The seawater was so close to freezing, and the air so cold, that on some days ice would start to freeze around us. The sheltered conditions that made Blomstrand such a great place to work also made it the most likely place for this to happen. So while out recording on our scarred male, I'd also have to keep an eye on the water. Thin ice forming is a glorious, flat mid-grey. I guess it's only an inch or so thick, and it's drive-throughable in a Buster. After a couple of tentative negotiations in our 14ft icebreaker, this even became good fun. The trick was recognizing when ice was freezing quicker, heavier and deeper, and so not so easy to pass through. That wasn't quite so entertaining, particularly when it was on the way back towards Ny Ålesund. For reasons best known to the ice, the landward side (away from Blomstrandhalvøya) seemed to freeze slower. So we'd putter back, looking for open water, scrunching though grey ice, black-grey cliff looming to our right. Once level with Blomstrandhalvøya and into open water, looking back towards the glacier at our track refreezing was just delicious.

There was one decided disadvantage to this near-freezing seawater. I had to get used to sticking my hand into it, in order to extract and replace the Buster's bung. Seawater would enter the boat – mostly spray as we scuttered into chop. Every now and then, I'd have to take out the bung, a little rubber plug out of the very-back-very-bottom, then gun the engine. Speedboats go fast by planing – zipping over the water with only the outboard engine's leg and the V of the base of the hull in the water. To start planing, they must rise from displacement mode (when most of the boat's hull is still in the water). In doing so, the bow of the boat lifts. Holding a boat in this position makes it easy to drain it of excess water. This is normally pretty simple. In the waters off Kongsfjord, it involved bare hands and seawater on the cusp of turning to ice (the water that is, not my hands – although it didn't always seem that way). There's also the minor point that when the bow's sticking high up in the air, it's hard to see any partially submerged bergy bits skulking about, waiting to make trouble. The first time I tried, it took me three or four goes just to get the bung back in place. By the end, I couldn't feel my fingertips. Rather quickly, I got much more adept at bung-insertion, so even this became just another part of a day out.

But I never got used to our outboard engines playing up.

There's not all that much to do for the 20 or so people who stay in Ny Ålesund over the winter. Outboard servicing was supposed to be on the to-do list for one of the overwintering Polar Institute staff. Somehow it didn't happen. I began having trouble starting our outboard, then it sputtered when out on the water. KitnChristian had similar trials. Sofie and I were mostly out by ourselves. We'd always leave a record of where we'd gone and when we were due back in the logbook at the Polar Institute, and we had a radio. But the idea of breaking down out in the fjord wasn't particularly appealing.

My misspent times with elderly European motorcycles meant I wasn't totally incompetent around internal combustion engines, and a bit of futzing with the carburettors kept us going for a while. But things got worse. KitnChristian's engine needed replacement. Then ours did. There was a limited supply of outboards in Ny Ålesund, and we were running out. KitnChristian needed the more powerful engines – their Buster was marginally bigger, they had more need of speed when netting pups. Eventually Sofie and I were left with the smallest engine available, all 15 straining horsepower of it, incapable of convincing our Buster to plane. Our little trips to visit our scarred seal in Blomstrand, and his less distinctive confrères elsewhere in the fjord took a lot longer.

[Read the next part of this post here.]

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part III.

2007-07-22T14:41:00.000-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here.]

The Polar Institute owned a few small Busters, deeply veed, heavily built open aluminium skiffs. Christian had been working in Ny Ålesund, off and on, for over 20 years, and had a well-deserved reputation for being tough on equipment. Then again, he gets things done that no-one else would even dream of trying. Christian's not all that tall for a Norwegian, around six foot, but gives the appearance of being carved out of something very solid. A rough carving – squarish head to square shoulders, deep chest, blocky legs. His fame for gear destruction meant that we got the most-bashed of the few boats available.

Ny Ålesund has a concrete quay, visited occasionally by the Svalbard governor's icebreaker with supplies, and by the ever-increasing traffic of cruise liners come summer. Each year, as the ice clears the fjord, a pontoon gets put inside the L of the harbour wall, creating a tiny shelter for the Busters and other researchers' boats. The pontoon had just been set up when we arrived, so Christian and Dag started getting the boats ready. The boats and engines were dragged from the shed where they'd been stored for winter.

Sofie and I were getting acoustic equipment ready for use on the water, so didn't see what happened next. We heard that there was a problem with the boats, so popped down to help. We could see Dag in a boat without an engine, drifting into the fjord. Once past the mouth of Kongsfjord, there's not much until Greenland, hundreds of sea miles to the west. Christian and Bjørn were starting the outboard engine on the second boat. In minutes, Christian had thrown a rope to Dag and towed the him back to the pontoon. Dag stepped out, apparently none the worse for a couple of hours' drifting by himself. In a mixup, he'd entered the boat before it was secured to the pontoon, and off he'd floated.

But Dag had gone on his little drift without gloves. Kit immediately checked his hands for frostbite and started first aid. He was in trouble. The next day, Dag's fingertips were huge blisters, (everything about Dag was huge – he's about 6ft 6). Kit oversaw his first aid, phoned doctors in Norway for advice as it became clear that his frostbite was serious. The blisters gradually turned a deep, bright purple, swelled up like sausages. He caught the next plane out and was in Tromsø hospital in a couple of days. Dag had been along to assist, so we made do with one less set of hands.

I learned a little more respect for the cold.

Landfast ice forms as the sea surface freezes over, and remains frozen to land (hence the name). The ice that had melted, making our little harbour usable, was the winter's landfast ice. But ice conditions change, so the next morning, we came down to see ice clogging much of the little harbour, almost around our boats. The shoreline current in Kongsfjord ran anticlockwise, with an unfortunate tendency to bring bergs from the mouth of the fjord along the southern coast to Ny Ålesund. This time, small bergy bits blocked the inside of the harbour. I assumed we weren't going anywhere on the water that day.

Instead, I was shown why these little boats were called Busters, and why their hulls had so many small (and not so small) dints in them. Christian jumped in one, Bjørn in another. They started pushing bergs around, bergs bigger than the boats. They'd ram some, break them in two, then shove. Working as a team, they had a path cleared in minutes. So we headed out, a chance for me to learn my way around the fjord.

Sofie wasn't with us - she was recording sounds from the harbour wall in a separate project. Instead we had two German scientists who were there at Christian's invitation. They were in the Buster with Bjørn, I was with KitnChristian. Christian motored towards the head of the fjord. Every so often, we'd stop, Kit and he would take up binoculars, scan the ice ahead for seals, move on. We puttered from fairly open water to bumping our way through almost-solid ice. Eventually the landfast ice at that head of the fjord became too much of a barrier, we motored anticlockwise towards Blomstrandhalvøya.

And we saw seals, three species in quick succession. Bearded seals, our primary interest: big grey, relaxed animals lolling on small floes, well out from the landfast ice. Long, long white whiskers (hence “bearded”) and rounded heads create an – accurately - dopey impression. Their pups, born at over 70 pounds, chunky from birth, grey heads of a Labrador crossed with a jelly bean, circles of cream around their eyes creating their look of permanent bemusement. A ringed seal, on the landfast ice – adults smaller than the bearded seal pups, silver-grey, slight, hiding. There was a female harp seal hauled out on a floe in more open water, tan and white, unusual but not rare in Kongsfjord.

And as we motored back, a young male walrus snoozed on a floe by himself in the sun. Compared with the other seals, he was huge. He was also much rarer. Blubber and ivory, popular with people, are not so great for the animals born with them. More than three centuries of hunting left walrus almost completely exterminated in Svalbard. They've been protected since the early 1950s, but there are still no good estimates of their population size. Best guess is a couple of thousand. Our male, blissfully ignorant of his rarity, lay out, his impersonation of a fat retiree in the tropics interrupted only to sit up and glare at us when we approached for some photos.

It's the only time I've ever seen four new species of marine mammal in one day.

[Read the next part of this post here.]

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part II.

2007-07-20T14:48:00.001-04:00

[Read the first part of this post here]

We were working from Ny Ålesund, the northernmost village on earth. Set on a little flat land by the fjord, it's a multicoloured scatter of old miners' cottages mixed with more modern buildings. Some huts date back to the original coal mine, opened during World War I. One's been kept as a little museum to life back then. Looks rough. Transport to markets was always an issue: from Ny Ålesund, it's about twice as far to Oslo as it is to the North Pole. Despite the prop of government subsidies, a series of fatal accidents in the 1950s and early 1960s saw the collapse of the King's Bay Coal Company's mining venture in 1963. Soon after, the village was reborn for research, initially just Norwegian, then gradually other nations established research programs. Ny Ålesund remains a company town, and King's Bay AS, as it's now known, owns and provides almost everything on site.

There were never any indigenous Svalbardians. Although Norwegians, Icelanders and Pomors (the people of northwestern Russia) claim stories of might-be Svalbard, the archipelago remained unmapped until visited by a Frisian, Willem Barents, just before the end of the 16th Century. Barents found Spitzbergen, the largest of Svalbard's islands. His late Renaissance mix of vessel and mapping technology guaranteed him a place in history, but not his life. He died before returning to the Netherlands. These days, travel to Ny Ålesund is quite a bit easier.

A little under two hours' 737 flight from Tromsø,and I was at Longyearbyen's small airport. Boasting a bit under 2000 people, Longyear is the largest of Svalbard's six settlements. I'd travelled with Kit, Christian and Dag, scientists with the Norwegian Polar Institute. We had an afternoon to take in the town – for me, the most important option being shopping for cold weather gear. Dinner in a log-cabin restaurant was followed by an overnight stay at the Polar Institute's barracks by the airport.

Come morning, we trundled our gear out to a high-winged, long-nosed Dornier. Just a half hour hop with a little over a dozen other scientists, and we'd be at Ny Ålesund. It's a short but spectacular flight. The little Dornier's not pressurized, so stays low, close enough to take in the landscape clearly. I'd thought, when flying in to Tromsø a couple of days earlier, that northern Norway was a landscape of ice, mountains and white. But northern Norway includes trees – a few small birches, but trees just the same. Compared with Spitzbergen's mountains, northern Norway is rainforest.

Longyear's few signs of humanity disappear within seconds of takeoff. We humans are ubiquitous - there aren't many places on land with no sign whatsoever of our presence. But this flight is an exception: no buildings or roads or power lines or huts. The flight crosses Isfjord, a short view of open water. Then land again, mountains, snow, glaciers. No trees. Ranks and ranks and ranks of jutting white peaks. Glaciers fill valleys.

Welcome to the Arctic.

Too soon, the open water of Kongsfjord, and a colored sprinkle of wooden buildings. Ny Ålesund.

Well, not all too soon - Sofie was waiting to meet me. Back then – early May, 2000 – we were just months off marriage. She'd already done a few weeks' fieldwork, so we hadn't seen each other for a while. Sofie's classical Flemish: round, cute face; button nose; large eyes; strong, rather than slender physique. Not much more than her smile was showing when I saw her. The rest of her was indistinguishable, covered in multiple layers of Polarfleece and GoreTex. Arctic fashion is mostly unflattering.

She'd been working with Bjørn, a research assistant for KitnChristian. Kit and Christian are a couple, two highly successful scientists. They're near enough to inseparable, and to Sofie and I their names merged into one. Kit was Sofie's mentor for her postdoctoral fellowship in Norway, a Canadian who combined intellect with a look that mixed tall and formidable – sort of Shieldmaiden With PhD. She treated Sofie like a kid sister.

High Arctic work is impossible alone, so Sofie and Bjørn had been working together, alternating days, Sofie recording bearded seal calls, then Bjørn shooting a few ringed seals for a Polar Institute project. So they vacillated between two extremes of research: benign (listening, taping seal calls) to ferociously invasive (shooting seals). Bjørn looked the archetypal Norwegian - tall, blond, solid, outdoorsy – and, fitting his archetype, he was a good shot. At least the seals died quickly.

Bjørn's project was finished by the time I arrived.

April had seen most of inner Kongsfjord frozen, so Sofie had been snowmobiling out to make her recordings. But by now, the sea ice was breaking up on the fjord, and we could start using boats.

[Read the next part of this post here.]

Connections

2007-07-17T13:02:00.000-04:00

So what do two posts on giving birth have to do with a blog on marine environmental management - apart from the chance to drop in a couple of cute kiddy photos?

Most of my blogging will be of the life that Sofie and I had during our four years in Norway. Including her eclampsia. Turns out that of all the situations we'd encountered – on ice floes tagging seal pups; in a small boat darting killer whales – the most dangerous was in the labour ward of the local hospital.

Like everyone, scientists are products of their society, as our time in Norway demonstrated. The mindset of hospital staff that allowed Sofie's condition to collapse into disaster - their lack of professionalism – was something distinctly different from anything Sofie or I had ever encountered. That same mindset was prevalent in many of the biologists with whom I worked. Its legacy is ecological devastation of the European Arctic.

But ecological collapse in the ocean isn't immediate and obvious like eclampsia, so their conduct goes unchallenged. My recognition of impending disaster, my decision to act were borne of an understanding of the risks Sofie faced. Unless we understand what's at risk from the mess we're making in the ocean, we'll never act.

Maybe we won't anyway.

And when professionals get it wrong..........

2007-07-16T13:44:00.001-04:00

Labour ward, The University Hospital of Northern Norway, Tromsø. July 2003.

Sofie rises, once again, takes the few steps from her bed to the bathroom. The midwives keep telling her she needs to pee. She still hasn't. She's clean, washed, washed out, wearing a light gray, long sleeved t-shirt of mine. Pale.

I can't get too close to her. My smell still makes her want to puke, but it's been over six hours since Caitlin was born.

Annette changed the sheets a while ago. Caitlin sleeps in the cot, stainless and plastic, at the end of the bed. Marie Jeanne in a corner, reading, a new grandmother. Annette sorts equipment, preparing for the next birth.

Sofie's steps are small, slow.

I look away, check Caitlin.

I turn to Sofie. She stands in front of the toilet, starts shaking. Last time she shook a little, then sat down. I thought it tiredness. Now her legs keep shaking, she doesn't move.

“Sofie!”

No response.

“Sofie!”

It's maybe four steps to her. Somehow I'm there already. I call again. Nothing. Shakes spread to her arms. She doesn't hear me. This is it.

I grab her, turn her, hold her from behind. My arms under her shoulders, hold her tight.

I yell, “SHE'S FITTING SHE'S FITTING SHE'S FITTING.”.
[blog advisory note here - occasional rude words in the next section]

As I do, she goes rigid. Wooden. Inanimate.

I'm dragging her out of the bathroom, towards the door. Enclosed space - got to get out before the next phase.

Somehow I dodge the sink. Her arms and shoulders are through the door when I feel it coming. Thrashing – can I hold her? Can't risk it. Can't drop her. I do, she's dead.

I lie her down. Weird, wood-person lowering. Gently, gently. Hold her head. Don't let it hit the floor. My hand's under the back of her head, I slide it out along the floor. She's down. The top of her body's in the delivery room, legs still in the bathroom.

Annette bolts over. “HIT THE RED BUTTON. BY THE BED”, she screams at Marie Jeanne. Marie Jeanne, eyes wide, runs, looks, presses. The alarm screams.

Sofie's arms and legs are everywhere, flailing. Annette grabs a syringe - Valium - slams it into her arm.

I'm standing over Sofie's hips, looking down. Her eyes are rolled back in her head, the whites showing. Only they're light green. Her head tips over to the left and froth, the same light green, bubbles out. Her hands, feet whack the floor, again, again. Again.

Anger. Erupting, enveloping.

Still standing over her, I start to scream, “How the fuck could you let this happen”, but I only get as far as you, and stop, look down at Sofie.

You don't have the luxury of losing control. These fuckwits might yet kill her. Force it down. Control.

Control.

The Valium kicks in, her thrashing easing. People arrive.

They're taking too long. Recovery position. That goop in her mouth – she's gonna choke. Or bite through her tongue. No-one's doing anything. Too long. Time to act.

I hear steps, look back at the door. Someone - the head midwife ? arrives. Short, fat, with the hairstyle favoured by Norwegian matrons - not much on the sides, bouffant on top - she stands at the doorway to the room, mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. Doing nothing. Annette defers to her. Nothing happens. Nothing.

Sofie lies there.

Seconds. Eternity.

Go. Act.

I shout at them, “Get her onto the bed. Grab her arms, I'll get her legs. ”.

They move, obedient. We settle her on the bed. She's stopped thrashing.
More staff arrive. A team from intensive care unit move in. Purposeful.

I step back.

Someone asks about head injuries.

“No the husband got her.”, Annette answers.

Marie Jeanne pipes up, “What's going on?”.

“What I've been fucking worried about for the past month!”, I yell at her.

Ellen, finally on the scene, yells back, “Well, so have we!”.

I glare at her, contain myself. Breathe.

Doctors do things. A drip is attached. Busyness.

Sofie is wheeled off, to the intensive care unit. I can't go, must wait until she's been stabilized. A young doctor walks up to me.

“We've given her something to prevent any more seizures........”, she starts.
I interrupt. “Magnesium sulphate.”.

“Yes.”.

She goes to say something else, looks into my eyes. Decides better, walks off.

Everyone leaves. Sofie has gone, the gaggle of ICU specialists pushing her bed to somewhere I can't go. Ellen, the doctor, walks over, shaken.

“Its terrible. The worst should be over now. But if things get worse...........”, she shakes her head, “Well, we don't want to think about that.”.

I just glare at her. I can't speak. Stay quiet. Don't do anything that might stop you being with Sofie. Soon as possible.

Ellen can't hold my gaze, turns away, walks out. Annette touches my arm, points to the door. She pushes Caitlin's cot, takes us out, along a corridor, into another room.

Caitlin sleeps.

The new room is bigger. Annette turns, grabs me, wraps her arms around me, saying ,“That was a good thing you did.”.

We both cry. I stop, find a jug, drink water. Metabolism. Adrenaline rush. You're going to need water. Drink.

After a while, Caitlin wakes, cries. She's fed a few times already, looks to nuzzle Sofie's breast. But Sofie is gone. I pick her up, she cries.

I walk around the room, holding her, singing.

Somehow Caitlin is fed.

All I recall is walking circuits of the room with Caitlin in my arms. Singing. Thirst. Circuits.

Waiting for news of Sofie.

HELLP. Or when pregnancy goes wrong, but professionals get it right.

2007-07-16T13:41:00.000-04:00

The double l is not a typo – HELLP's a condition that's part of the suite of problems called pre-eclampsia. It's one of the less pleasant ones. Here's the short version of what happened......

Our boy was born a couple of weeks ago, four weeks early. Sofie had high blood pressure brought on by her pregnancy, but without many of the other markers for pre-eclampsia – protein in her urine, for instance. Not fire-hose blood pressure like last time, but still, not good.

So. One day we're in the local hospital, Sofie's getting blood tests, all come back okay, except for her one marker, trending up. Verdict – if nothing gets worse, baby out in about ten days. Next morning, Sof's puking and feeling lousy – first time in months that she's had a chunder. Ring the doctors', pop in a little after 0900. Time to start delivery.

So by 1300, they've started induction and she's on a magnesium sulphate drip. By 1800, not much happening in the way of contractions, but she's got some small tremors in her extremities. Shakes start spreading. She throws up. Doctor's called back in, cranks up the MgSO4. A few minutes' respite from shakes, then they reappear.

By 1930 or so (I guess, I wasn't checking my watch closely at this point) – Sofie's twitching all over. Several impressive, down-to-bile pukes. Bernadette, the midwife caring for her, looks worried.

Sofie has one very small seizure. Her back muscles tense, her body jolts a little, not much. Because I'm behind her, I notice.

“Seizure”, I say.

Sofie looks around with that – where was I – expression that comes of blacking out for a second or so.

Bernadette says, “You sure?”, but as she does, Sofie's leg spasms. Bernadette hits the call button.

Head midwife arrives. Bernadette speaks with her, quickly. Doctor arrives. Glances exchanged, short discussion, nods.

“We're going to do a caesarean now”, he says.

Two hours later, a small boy, purple, smeared in white goop, cried in my arms.

And by 2230, Sofie's sitting up in bed, saying, “Wow. I feel fine.”.

----------------------

It could have gone very differently. Sofie's blood tests weren't really showing much. Her blood pressure was up, but not horrifically high. There was no protein in her urine.

Then, suddenly, bang. Things went downhill, really fast.

But medical and nursing staff understood what was happening, knew the danger. They listened to us, too. And they responded, really fast.

So now - apart from recovering from major abdominal surgery and not getting a hell of a lot of sleep - Sofie's fine. Because she was cared for by professionals who knew what they were doing.

Doesn't always go like that.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, to Franz Josef Land. September, October 2002

2007-07-13T14:38:00.000-04:00

We fly low, scaring most of the harps into diving. A few gaze up, little heads and shoulders bobbing in open water between the floes. The ice edge, way north this year, holds them. Pans the size of suburban house blocks jostle each other, seals splopping into cracks of water as we pass. Transect legs end over dense pack. As we bank, turning at the top of one V to make our way back southeast, I gaze at ice, solid to the North Pole. Floes crammed together, cracks showing their boundary, but no more open water. Just ice. White, less than 600 miles to the world's end.

Arktika levels off, the next leg begins, dreams of the Pole vanish. I rub the fog off the domed window one more time, wriggle again into another not-too-uncomfortable position, change focus, shift from taking in scenery to scanning for marine mammals. The ice stretches on, miles and miles of water mixing solid white and liquid dark. Mammals of the ice edge dive or stare, as they want. Walrus, polar bears gaze up from ice floes. Bears weave heads in aggression at our noise, giant white bear-snakes. One bear, head, shoulders and forepaws bright red with blood, sits on a pan little bigger than itself, challenging the plane for its ringed seal, a red smear on the ice. Minke whales, humpbacks, whitesided dolphins dive as we pass over. White shoulder flashes of the minkes shine underwater as they go. Killer whales – mammal eaters prowling the ice edge in threes - ignore us. By the east shore of Spitzbergen, belugas glow cream underwater. But mostly salt water, rough, deep blue-grey. For all the flying, little to see. We're nowhere near the capelin schools swarming to the south.

The flights cover the Barents Sea, Svalbard to Franz Josef Land, south almost to the sea’s centre, a sparse plaid of northeast-southwest, northwest-southeast lines. Each day’s flying longer than a transAtlantic flight. Engines drone, I stare at sea. We Norwegians, and Norwegian-helpers, do two hours on, one hour off. The Russians never take a break. Mostly nothing. Hours of black-blue ocean surface, a sighting, more nothing. I wipe the bubble of the window when it fogs too much. Stretch, wriggle, stay alert. Animals, when they appear, gone immediately. Russian crickles through the headphones when the crew sees something. Rain. Fog. Wind. Whitecaps on blackness. We drop below fogbanks, to thirty metres above the ice. Anything swimming below us dives deep, frightened by our noise.

We pass over most of Svalbard's islands – Spitzbergen, Nordaustlandet, Edgeøya, Hopen, brown, bare, relief from just sea. We're so low I look up at the hills. Long pebble beaches. Whale bones. We're flying over one of the most remote parts of the planet. No point thinking about what happens if we ditch in the sea.

Report from this survey (warning - 4.2MB pdf!)

The pack ice edge, east of Greenland. March, April 2002

2007-07-13T14:32:00.000-04:00

Our world is ice, sprinkled with seals. The pilot finds a pan big enough, lands. We jump out, walk a few metres, turn away, crouch, hold our gear. Rotors whip ice flurries into us, the helicopter disappears. Lance, our icebreaker home, is over the horizon. No sign of humanity.
What planet is this?

The ice – thin, pancakey stuff, no height to it – lifts, eases down, driven by the swells from a storm somewhere way south, north of Iceland. We stand still, the ice moves in gentle sinewaves – enough motion to upset Sofie, prone to seasickness. Beneath us, there's a metre or so of ice, then over a mile of sea. The eastern coast of Greenland lies somewhere way to the west.

All around, scattered among the ice, cream-white harp seal pups, fluffy toys come alive. Dark bodies of mothers lolling, nursing. Other mums bob in the water, watching us. We sort out our gear, hoist packs, move off. The helicopter allows a team of five. Garry, Callan and I tag pups, Sofie and Ilse record the bleats pups call to their mothers. It’s not too cold, maybe –10C, we get around in flotation suits and Sorrel boots, warm enough. Thin woolly gloves cover fingers, our coldest bits. Backpacks carry what we need for a few hours out: spare socks, chocolate, spraycans, binoculars, tags, towels, radio, batteries. I carry more tags on a ring on my belt. Sofie and Ilse stay a couple of hundred metres from us, recording pups undisturbed by our tagging.

Harp seal pups redefine cute. They suck their flippers, roll, gaze around, scratch, greet mum with cry and a kiss on the nose, watch us with those huge, liquid-black eyes. We approach. Some pups take off over the ice, dragging themselves for the water. We laugh, slip, run across the little pans to get them. Some escape, pup-paddle to another floe, bleat for mum, sad and wet. Others scrunch up into a still, short, chubby, hard version of themselves, unmoving, making themselves into easily grabbed fluffy toys. Some fight back when caught, gumming our ankles furiously, bleating battle cries. Their teeth are, at most, tiny white nubbins, no risk to our floater suits. We allow them their bravery.

We clip small tags into their hind flippers, and they wail. They poo all over our hands – light brown, the squidginess of milk drinkers. My spraycan out, quick graffiti onto their back, across ice for more. Our decorative seal pups tell us who we’ve tagged, where we’ve been in the icescape, always moving. After a few hours, a radio call tells of the arriving helicopter, we head back to Lance.

[read the next part of this post here]

Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord, Svalbard. May 2000

2007-07-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

In science, as in life, a bit of luck helps. One male seal's patrol area – a couple of hundred metres of ice edge – is a quiet part of Blomstrand. He's scarred, so we identify him; a half-moon on his back, always visible as he surfaces. Probably a shark bite. His display site is far enough from Blomstrandbreen, the local glacier, that the small bergs, calving occasionally, don't worried us. Sofie hears them through the hydrophone, our boat rocks in their wash.

Blomstrand, a little cul-de-sac bay, buds off the northern shore of Kongsfjord, a few minutes' pootle across the fjord from Ny Ålesund. A peninsula-turned-island, Blomstrandhalvøya, (formed in 1992, courtesy of Blomstrandbreen's melting) shelters the bay from chop on the fjord, so the water is as calm as we can possibly expect. And there's a cabin on the island – shelter if we need - in the remains of the mining village of Ny London. Our 14 foot Buster's a tough little boat and we have a radio, but we're only 750 miles from the North Pole, so safety needs a little thought.

Sofie's recording the sounds of male bearded seals. Their main call, a trill, starts like the whine of a midsized dog, then warbles down for about 30 seconds - the Dr Who theme music of the marine mammal world. Sitting quiet by the ice edge, engine off, the scarred male's calls drift through the alloy hull of the Buster. Sofie pulls the digital tape recorder from her survival suit (her body heat keeps the batteries warm), connects up the hydrophone, eases it into the water, starts taping. Now we sit, listening, waiting for him to reappear. Headphones on, Sofie hears the calls stop, signals to me. I hear the chuff of his breath in the air. A small round, dark head,followed by an oval of back, paralleling the ice edge. Nostrils open, nostril close, back under. An interlude of just two or three breaths, then down he goes again, his trill restarting.

And so we sit, watching the seal, then watching the surface where the seal isn't as he calls below us, takes notes when he surfaces: how many breaths he takes between dives, how far he moves. Twenty seconds or so at the surface is followed by a couple of minutes underwater.

I keep an eye out for polar bears. The boat's safer than land or sea ice, but our rifle – a stainless steel and black plastic .308, courtesy of the Polar Institute – stays unloaded in its bag. Our flare pistol is stashed in our day pack, flares scattered in with more standard items for a few hours out - chocolate, thermos of coffee, spare gloves. We see no bears round Blomstrand.

Read the next part of this post here.

Link to Ny Ålesund

Inishkea, Ireland. January 1998

2007-07-13T14:09:00.000-04:00

Skeletons of small stone houses over a crescent of white sand beach. A dark stone pier. Through clear seawater, grey rock. Algae in shades of dark green, lilting. A low hill. Grass, scrub, sporadic sheep. An Irish island, deserted seven decades.

Richard angles into the tiny bay, slows. The pontoon kisses rock, Pete and I hop onto the pier, tie off. The RIB – Rigid-hulled Inflatable Boat - fibreglass hull, inflated rubber fenders – is snugged in. Richard passes up our packs, we throw them on, trudge up the hill to the birder's hut.

The hut, a small prefab steel box – straight lines in reds and black - modernity, stands separate, uphill from from the greybrown stone of dead houses. Ugly, but a roof, stove, bunks - shelter for the three of us. We dump the packs, trudge back. We're already wearing our drysuits. The trip from Aghleam, the nearest village, had been a little wet.

Time for work.

We cast off, head for the other islands. Richard drives, standing at the centre console, squinting into the wind, his face an array of sharp angles. He's almost the Discovery Channel cutout of a field biologist – compact, fit, broad shouldered. Self-contained. From our shared months of fieldwork back in Australia, I'm comfortable. Richard has his act together. Pete, I don't know. He's dark Irish, smiling, dishevelled, the first small hints of a beer gut starting to press his drysuit.

We reach our first islet. The seals are cautious, as they should be. Richard slows the boat, we circuit, keeping our distance. Heads pop up from rocks, curious, watching. We edge in, counting seals as they appear. The boat enters the seals' perimeter, one seal decides we're too close, and the rush is on. We tally the splashes as they galoomph across the last few yards of rock, slip into the water. Once swimming, safe, they watch some more, almost-doggy faces bopping damp around us. We compare numbers.

Now the fun starts. The counts are for Pete's research – population ecology, habitat use. Time for Richard's project – diet.

We're working from a RIB, so Richard can't drive up onto the rocks for us to clamber ashore and stay dry. Rocks and fibreglass don't mix. Were we using a normal inflatable boat, we could, as is standard practice for the science of seal poo-collection. But we're working from islands that are just too far offshore for a standard inflatable. It'd be safe enough for the between-island hops, such as the ones we were making today – but getting to and from Inishkea – the island where we were overnighting - wouldn't be an option, except in perfectly calm seas. Perfectly calm seas aren't all that common here, hence the RIB. And the swim.

I ease into the water, release the pontoon, fin towards the islet, keeping my hands and face clear. It's only thirty yards or so, but this is northwest Ireland in winter. I'm wearing thermal underwear beneath my borrowed drysuit. Even so, the seawater through my wetsuit booties tells me more than I hoped to know about temperature. A pinhole reveals itself in an arm and my drysuit becomes a dampsuit. Seeping seawater reaches my armpit, just so I can truly appreciate a January dip in the North Atlantic. I lift my hands a little further out of the water. Pete fins beside me holding a net and watertight bag.

Fins scrape bottom, we waddle ashore backwards, cautious on the dark, slippery rock. We sit, remove our fins, walk like humans. The seals have left the islet empty. They don't mind the water temperature.

We wander the rocks, collecting samples of faeces for Richard's project. Turn a plastic bag inside out around my hand, bend over, pick up a faecal pie. Just like cleaning up after a dog. But we mark our bags with dates and numbers, record the position. And if two are close together, looking similar (it's easy to develop an eye for poo) - well, Richard insists we collect only one of them. Otherwise, we'd commit one of the worst sins in ecological research: pseudoreplication - assuming that samples are independent when they may not be. More prosaically, maybe a seal shat, moved a little, then shat again. Or maybe it rolled in its shit.

Seals do that.

Snippets on fieldwork

2007-07-13T14:06:00.000-04:00

A series of fieldwork vignettes follow........

Actually, there's nothing else. The way I've set this up, it always adds this Read More! line.

Fishery management and marine mammal culls

2007-07-13T11:30:00.000-04:00

In the summer of 2006, smoke rose from an industrial incinerator in the Norwegian Arctic.

A few months earlier, harp seals had gathered on the pack ice off northwestern Russia for their annual ritual of renewal - of birth and mating. Whitecoat pups emerged, wet and bleating, from their mothers. Males arrived, singing for mates. Pups fattened, moulted their white baby fur. Then the hunters came, for their ritual - destruction. They killed ten thousand seals, sailed back to Norway, delivered the bloodied skins to their local tannery. But the tanning company had no market for the pelts, so by early summer, the remains of the ten thousand seals were burnt.

All – the killing, the burning – paid for by government subsidies.

Newspaper account of this (in Norwegian)

While smoke rose over the fjords, people gathered on a tropical island. The International Whaling Commission was meeting again, representatives from dozens of nations gathering for their annual ritual, argument over humanity's dealings with whales. The Saint Kitts and Nevis Declaration gave whaling nations their first significant victory for decades. It included reference to how whales “consume huge quantities of fish...requiring that the issue of management of whale stocks must be considered in a broader context of ecosystem management”.

Like iPods and hybrid cars, marine mammal hunting is a growth industry of first decade of the 21st Century. Hunting has become, once again, the main way that seals die at the hands of men. The number of individuals, and species, of whales killed by whaling has increased too. This is just the start. Plans are afoot to return to much larger-scale commercial whaling in the name of “ecosystem-based fishery management”. Such an approach sounds great in principle, but what does it mean? Fishermen's complaints that marine mammals eat their fish is nothing new. What's new is the explicit link being made between hunting marine mammals and effective – scientific - fisheries management.

Being mammals of the land, we venture the ocean on boats, our moving mechanical islands. Even when fishermen choose to look down and think, seawater, the medium in which our fisheries disasters are wrought, blankets evidence of our blunders. Unlike some of our mistakes on land, our marine errors are forever hidden from view. They reveal themselves in fisheries statistics and the writings of scientists, as impenetrable as a murky sea at night to most of us.

Over the past decade, the appearance of studies in premier scientific journals illuminating yet one more marine disaster – fish populations reduced to a tenth or less of their former abundance, fisheries to disappear by the middle of this century – has become another ritual. But only the price of fish, or perhaps comments by celebrity chefs, cause some of us to pay attention. Mostly, we don't notice at all. Fishermen notice, because they work longer, travel further, catch less. And as fish disappear, some fishermen see other marine predators eating some scraps we've missed, and question their right to exist.

Marine mammals, called to the surface to breathe, pull attention to themselves, as they always have. Predatory fish, breathing seawater, escape blame. Ecosystem collapses, driven by overfishing and pollution, occur on scales of time and space beyond imagining. Old men's remembrances of better times become mere fishermen's tales. But marine mammals, forced by their need for air – our shared mammalian heritage - are noticed, and so become scapegoats for our mismanagement.

Mammals have long been part of our marine dreaming, scapegoats being their latest role. Selkies, the seal-people of Celtic myth, spoke of peoples' connection to the sea. On the far side of the world, the Yuin people of southeast Australia knew individual killer whales as reincarnated family. Job used Leviathan to project an image of incomprehensible power. In Moby Dick, Melville gave form to malevolence through the perils of open-boat whaling. Harp seal pups, poster children of modern environmentalism, queried our brutality with those huge liquid eyes. The recent saga of Keiko, Freeing Willy for real, ends with death in a Norwegian fjord, a modern parable of the failure of good intentions.

But in the minds of hunters, marine mammals have morphed from resources for harvesting into pests for culling. The Norwegian hunt for harp seals off northwestern Russia in 2006 demonstrates where this leads – wasteful killing of unmarketable animals. At the same time in most Western nations, marine mammals have gone from resources into animals worthy of cherishing. Both metamorphoses are profound, but the darker version remains unnoticed. And now, it has found form. Conceptualizing marine mammals as pests finds its reality in the hunters' version of “ecosystem-based fishery management”.

What's in a name?

2007-07-13T11:24:00.000-04:00

The title comes from a Les Murray poem, Spermaceti.

...Eyesight is a leakage
of nearby into us........

Some of what this blog's about -
marine mammals, the ocean, perception.
Our limited view.

And a link to some of Murray's poems