Scientists Use Seals to Videotape Deep Sea Fish

Jan. 31 -- Here's a challenge for a marine ecologist: Find out what it's really like to survive as a seal or a fish in the dark, cold, forbidding waters beneath Antarctica's floating ice fields.

It would be helpful to find a camera crew willing to strap on a bunch of equipment and dive hundreds of feet below the ice while snapping pictures of seals zipping through the water toward their prey. The crew would also need to keep a record of all sorts of things like water temperature, depth and location.

And, of course, they would need to survive the ordeal and return the equipment and all the data recorders to the scientist. That's an assignment that's not likely to appeal to very many photographers, so Lee Fuiman of the University of Texas and a few colleagues came up with an alternative. They recruited a bunch of Weddell seals to serve as their film crew.

The result, Fuiman says, is an extraordinary look at survival in the trenches beneath the ice that blankets Antarctica's McMurdo Sound for most of the year.

Star Cameraseal Ally McSeal

Fuiman, Randy Davis of Texas A&M, Galveston, and Terrie Williams of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have completed the first three-year phase of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and they have moved on to a more complex phase.

They couldn't have done it without the help of seals like the one with so much personality she was dubbed Ally McSeal, who became so fond of her collaborators that she returned to their base camp several times, apparently just to say howdy.

The equipment was attached to rubbery material like that used for wetsuits, and the rubber was glued to the pelt of the seals. But since the equipment, consisting of sensitive video cameras and all sorts of instruments, was worth thousands of dollars, and since all of the data and images would be stored on board the animal, the researchers were kind of anxious to come up with a way to guarantee that they would be able to recover it all.