The Field Crew



The whole team gathers and discusses the best way to approach the group of sea lions.



Sneaking close to the sea lions: how we get close enough to the animals to catch them



The Animals on the Rookery



Once we all have sea lions in the net, we check their molt and milk status. We deploy instruments on females that have already molted (otherwise the instruments would fall off with the molting fur), and that are producing milk - making it more likely that they will return to the rookery to suckle the pup and therefore more likely we will be able to recapture them and recover our instruments.



This is what we use to sedate the sea lions while we work on them.



We measure how big the females are by length and...



...how big they are by girth.





The instruments are glued to the fur of the sea lions. The larger instrument near the head of the female, tells us how deep she dives, where she goes and what the water temperature is. The smaller instrument on her lower back is a VHF transmitter that we use to find her among 100s of animals in order to recapture her.



We put a flipper tag on each foreflipper of the animals so that they can be identified in the future.



While the females recover from anesthesia, we put them in an animal carrier so that we can monitor her recovery.



The safest way to the weigh the females is in the kennels.