BARBARY COAST DIVERS NEWSLETTER

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The Marine Mammal Center

Roy and I volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center on Friday nights (and you're welcome to join us) and maybe you've seen it, but may not know the full extent of the operation. I'm going to create a series of the various departments, beginning with ...

Part II: Rehabilitation - Elephant Seals

... this is coming from Graham Charles shift supervisor of Friday Night Crew (FNC for insiders) and ballroom dancer extraordinair , and newly a father I might add

Getting into "the season"

For those of you who are new this year, this is what you've heard us talking about for weeks: the season. We are admitting animals nearly daily, and the number of tube feedings and labor-intensive fish school feedings is likely to go up for a while yet. (If it already seems like a lot, take heart from this fact: at this time last year, there were 65 elephant seals on site, plus 13 sea lions!).

Elephant seals are born in January and February, and will nurse from their mothers for only about four weeks before weaning. During this time they're often called "blackcoats" since they have a black lanugo fur; this sheds at around 4-6 weeks. Look for some thickish black hair on the extremities of seals that we admit in February or March; that's the last of the pup fur. We don't get blackcoats every year; this year, we got only a couple of partial blackcoats.

At this point, the animals are "weaners" (yep, that's what we call 'em!). In the wild, they would stay on the beach for a few weeks, living off the 200 pounds of fat they'd put on nursing from their mothers. (That's in 27 days or so, remember!) The longer they wait on the beach, the fewer sharks will remain offshore, so the fattest weaners have the greatest advantage. Some of the weaners, inevitably, will be too skinny to survive, generally because of wave action, human activity, or the poor care of an inexperienced or underweight mother has left them without enough surplus blubber. If they wind up in that condition on a public beach, we rescue the animals and bring them to The Marine Mammal Center. (We don't rescue from the "rookery" state reserve beaches like Año Nuevo.)

When they arrive, as you've seen, the animals are fed a high-fat formula through a tube. As soon as possible, however, we need to get the animal eating fish on its own. (Although this wouldn't occur in the wild until about 3-4 months, they are physically capable of eating fish almost from birth.) Our process has several steps:

1. Assisted feeds, in which a fish or chunk of fish is guided down the animal's throat with hands or forceps. (Evocatively, we used to call this a "force feed," but that's not really the right image: just as with tubing, the animal must take the fish by swallowing. We're just helping.) Sometimes we'll hold the animal's chin up while we do this, and in rare cases (and only when ordered by vet staff) we'll restrain the animal while assist feeding it.

2. Hand feeds, in which the fish is fed by hand to the animal.

3. Fish school, in which a fish is pulled around the water by hand, forceps, or string (yes, string!), getting the animal interested in its movements.

4. Free feeds, in which the seal grabs and dives for fish that aren't being manipulated in any way. This is often combined with live fish feeds (poor little goldfish!) that give the animals the sensation of tracking and catching a moving target.

As we're doing all of this, we're also trying to move the feeds from pen floor to tide pool to big pool.

That's the general idea!