Dec 03, 2018 - National Geographic Explorer
We awoke to
As we continued through one of the most photographic areas of the Antarctic Peninsula, we passed by ice floes covered with lounging crabeater seals and were escorted by an assortment of Antarctic birds—giant petrels, kelp gulls, skuas, and the beautiful snow petrel. And just ahead: a large group of pack ice-hunting killer whales!
They had just made a kill, as there was a congregation of birds on the surface above them, foraging on the scraps. As the killers continued along the channel in front of us, they spy hopped and investigated all the seals on nearby floes. Large Type B killer whales predominantly eat Weddell seals, but they’ll take the occasional crabeater. As we watched, it seemed most of us were rooting for the predator.
In the afternoon, we arrived at Neko Harbor for our first continental landing and
Jessica graduated with a degree in evolutionary biology from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Since graduation she has worked in fisheries management on commercial fishing vessels in the Bering Sea, counted Steller sea lions from cliffs in the Aleutian Islands, tagged sea lions in the Galápagos and monk seals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and for four austral springs she lived in a retrofitted refrigerator container on the Antarctic sea ice near McMurdo Station. In Antarctica she worked on a long-term population study of Weddell seals and hopes to continue working in this ecosystem on predator-prey dynamics of the Ross Sea.