Nicole Teutschel at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA--Clara, the 13-year-old elephant seal tagged by TOPP last May, had her tags removed today. It was no ordinary day for the E-Seal team! Clara didn’t return to Año Nuevo, instead she chose to come ashore at Piedras Blancas to have her pup. Like Año Nuevo, Piedras is an elephant seal colony south of Big Sur, and is comprised of many little harems along a few miles of beach.

The E-Seal team hiked along the hills and cliffs to check out the harems below, as well as a birds-eye view of the stormy seas. The winds were so intense the seals were speckled with sea foam that the wind picked up off the tops of the waves. This little yearling even climbed off the beach and up a cliff to escape the waves below.

We found Clara in a cove near the old Piedras Blancas lighthouse, far from the public viewing areas. On this secluded beach, in the intense storm, we recovered her tags, weighed her pup (a boy!), took physiology measurements, and even weighed Clara herself. Clara weighed near 970 pounds!

Here's Clara and her pup in her harem near the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse.

Clara and her pup after the procedure, as you can see her tags have already been removed. In the spring, she will molt off these patches where the tags had been attached.

After the procedure we decided to go looking for Cheddar, the tagged E-Seal who’s been missing in action for a few weeks now. In a previous posting, Where's Cheddar, we showed how she had been swimming in the seas near Año Nuevo for weeks! She had us stumped because typically when seals return to shore, they bee-line for the beach. Cheddar took the scenic route, down the coast, hung out in a few areas for days or even weeks and then bee-lined to…Piedras!

PhD students Luis Huckstadt and Jason Hassrick using telemetry (radio signals from one of Cheddar's tags) to figure out where Cheddar could be.

Luis Huckstadt, a PhD student at the Costa Lab at UC Santa Cruz, scanned for Cheddar up and down the beaches at Piedras. And sure enough, there was Cheddar, only yards away from Clara and her pup. Cheddar has yet to give birth to her own pup this year, but we’ll keep an eye on her. Soon we’ll travel down the coast to find our rogue seal once again and get those tags!

Luis scanning for Cheddar. Later she was found at the larger beach on the upper left hand corner of this photograph.