Seals On (and Off) the Beach

A second story from Joy Reidenberg, PhD.

Elephant Seal vocalizing

Joy’s seal stories are less rambunctious, but no less memorable. Confronting her first enormous elephant seals hauled out on shore only feet from her was just the beginning, an adventure in its own right for this self-proclaimed Nor’easter. But as a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine, Joy next finds herself conducting a necropsy on the monstrous head of a deceased female elephant seal, and enjoying every moment of it. This one was not the work of sharks.

Joy’s introduction is in another blog post.

You can watch Joy’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/LwVnMrR3kjo

SEALS ON AND OFF THE BEACH

My first trip to Monterey Bay was in 1989, I’m pretty sure, because I was there for the very first time I attended a Marine Mammal Conference. The conference was actually in Pacific Grove, but I made my way down to Monterey Bay at some point during that conference. I remember that pretty well because I was also pregnant at the time. And I was in the beginning of my eighth month so it was the last time I could fly. I had to get special permission to fly over there. But I was very excited about it.

I was not a student. I didn’t know about the Society (Society for Marine Mammalogy) when I was a student, so I came to my first marine mammal conference actually as a faculty member. But being pregnant did not stop me from investigating all the marine life I could get a hold of. I was so stunned…. First of all I looked west and the sunsets were beautiful! I’m looking out over the Pacific Ocean and the sun is setting over the Pacific Ocean! You know, in New York when I look west at sunset, you know what I see? I see New Jersey. (laughter) I see oil refineries and ships that are docked there. It’s not a very pretty sight to look west and see New Jersey for your sunset.

At the time I was living in New Jersey, so when I got out to California, I said “WOW! You have beautiful sunsets here. I just can’t tear myself away from the coast and looking at the sunset.” And then I looked down and what I saw were seals, on the rocks, like really close! I had never seen a seal. I knew they existed. But in New York, you know, we don’t have any shoreline that isn’t hardened at this point all around Manhattan and New York. So seals don’t come up and beach themselves, because there’s no beach. And if you go to the beach it’s like Jones Beach. It’s like, you know, 3 million people on the beach, so no seal’s gonna come up there.

So I’d never seen a seal – alive. I’ve seen dead ones. I do a lot of work in anatomy, so I see a lot of dead animals. Well, I saw these seals, and pregnant me, I didn’t care, I climbed over the fence, I went down on the rocks. I got really close – this was before the age of digital cameras. I only had my little, you know, regular camera, and I didn’t have a zoom lens because all of my research work was on dead animals. They didn’t move. I could get really close to them, so I didn’t need a long lens.

So it was like, I don’t know if I can get a picture of these seals cause I don’t have a telephoto. And I got closer and closer and they didn’t move! They just stayed there; they didn’t seem to care! So I stayed far enough away that they couldn’t bite me, or anything, but I was just stunned that I could see them so well. And then the sea lions came in, and, “Oh, My God, there’s sea lions now, too!”

And I didn’t realize how different males and females were. That was the first time it really struck me that males are called sea lions because they have this giant mane around their head! You know it’s not really long fur like lions have, but there is this giant thing, and then they opened their mouth and belched. Ok that was their roar! It’s like a lion roar, but it was this BIG belch. OK, now I get why they’re calling them sea l i o n s!

So that was my first introduction.

Then I went from Pacific Grove down to Monterey, and I saw the Aquarium. Now the animals there are cute – they have the sea otters, which are adorable – everybody falls in love with the sea otters. But the thing that grabbed me the most was the Aquarium was having this display of jellyfish, of all things. They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Before that, I hated jellyfish. They were nasty things that sting you. You never want to see one when you go in the ocean. But they had them in this really cool display with these beautiful blue backgrounds, and soft music was playing. And they put a little bit of a current in the tank, and it made them swirl around. And they had this great lighting on them – ultraviolet light and they were glowing. They were the most beautiful things. They looked like flowers floating around in circles. I was mesmerized and they couldn’t get me out of the Aquarium. It was closing, and I was still there looking at these tanks.

So that was my first introduction to that area. Of course, I had to come back. So I made liaisons with friends who were working in Santa Cruz, and I said, “I want to do some anatomy out here.” So I got invited back, and we got to work on elephant seals.

Now elephant seals are pretty cool animals. Most people think they are mad ugly, but I think they are really, really interesting. Especially the males, when they open their mouth and they start to, you know, make these giant bellowing noises that are sort of bbbbbbbb (hand over mouth, patting lips while blubbering, imitating a male e-seal’s vocalization).  What’s going on with these things? And I thought it was coming out of their nose! They have this giant, elephant-like nose. But I came to realize that the nose was simply blocking the mouth like this (Joy places her hand over her mouth again, patting it while vocalizing like an elephant seal), and it was blocking the mouth that was making these punctuated sounds. I thought that was really, really cool.

So I wanted to get a good close-up view of them. I wanted to get a really close up view of them, so I went out with some of the people who work in the area. Guy Oliver took me out on an expedition along the beach. I did not realize that with the right blue jacket and the right permissions, you could actually walk right up next to these things. I was terrified at first, cause you know each one is like the size of a truck. They’re HUGE, really, really, really big! But mostly they’re very lazy, so unless you piss them off, they’re not going to like, hurt you.

But I really had to avoid the business end. I’d walk around the tail and that was fine, and we’d look at the tags, and if they weren’t facing the right way, Guy would reach down and yank on the flipper so we could get the tag visible, and then they would turn around and say, “OK, I’m out of here!,” and I would back way off. But I would watch this whole scene as he was doing, like a bull fighter, this dance with these elephant seals, just so he could get the tag, so he could get a picture of the tag so he could see what number it was. I was stunned that you could be so close to them.

And then we went over to see some of the females. They were adorable. They’d just lie there relaxing like they’re in a spa. And he said, “You could get really close to them if you lay down.” And I said, “Really?” So I lay down like I was a seal. I was able to snug up pretty close to them. “This can’t be legal what I’m doing.” “Well, you’re under research permit, so it’s ok. You’re here to get pictures of them and you need to get close”, so that’s what I did. And I got a lot of really great pictures of them.

But somehow in the snuggling down in the sand, I lost my big giant purple hat. So someday you’re going to see an elephant seal out there wearing my big, purple hat, because it was cold that day. I never found it. I’m sure it’s sitting on top of some elephant seal’s head out there.

So then we got into some elephant seal research. And that meant recovering a specimen. Now these are big, big animals. It’s really hard to recover a specimen from them. So what I remember is I got a call from Sara Kienle, and she had gone out to recover this elephant seal that had died. But it’s really big. She says, “I can’t bring the whole thing back, so where should I cut it?“ So I’m giving her directions over the phone, and she’s trying to cut the head off so we can get the specimen that we need. And she ended up putting it on like a kid’s snowboard sleigh thing. You know like those sled things you go down the hill with, and you hold onto the sides. Looks like a little plastic toboggan. It’s something like that. She put it on something like that, and they were dragging the specimen across the beach. Which at this point it was primarily a fifth of the whole animal, but it was still humongous.

And then she said, “I’ve got it in the freezer. Now you have to fly over and see it.” So of course I did, and I wrangled a few other people to come and help me. Jodi, for example, was there taking pictures. We had a wonderful experience. We got to dissect all of the muscles of this area (the head), really understand how these animals are put together and how they are able to move their mouth and bite things, and to make sounds. We were looking at the larynx, which is the voice box, and how they make sounds.

My other experience in Monterey Bay, I was there for some filming. We were doing work for PBS on a series called Big Blue Live. Just before the series started filming, I had an opportunity to go out to sea. So I went out on Fast Raft[1]. Kate Spencer is a friend of mine. She took me out. And I got to see a whole bunch of firsts; for me they were firsts. It was the first time I’d ever seen a blue whale. It was the first time I’d ever seen Dall’s porpoises. It was the first time I’d ever seen killer whales. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a great white shark, but we did see a great white shark. It was the first time I saw an ocean sunfish, Mola mola. And I don’t remember what else we saw at this point, cause my head is boggled up with it all.  But we did get some pretty good views of humpback whales, which are really, really cool animals.

[1] Fast Raft Ocean Safaris, owned and operated by Kate Spencer.