"He was thrilled; this was the first leopard seal he'd ever seen in Chile, where he is from. As he peered through his binoculars, he noticed another, smaller seal: a pup. "I got so excited, and then we got there, and it's dead," he said. As the boat drew nearer, he could see the pup was still haloed in downy white hairs, suggesting it was less than a week old. Its head was submerged and its limp body was frozen to the ice."
"In 2023, Borras-Chavez and Emily Sperou, a marine mammal ecophysiologist at the same university, set out on another expedition in Chile, this time to another leopard seal hangout at Laguna San Rafael National Park in Patagonia, where chunks of calving glaciers bob around blue waters. A Chilean ranger had given him a heads up that a seal in the lagoon, who was known as LSR01, or Nora, had given birth to a pup a couple weeks earlier on Oct. 18-a lively, yellow baby."
"Borras-Chavez had no hope of seeing the newborn. No leopard seal pups born in Chile survive past infancy, for reasons scientists are still puzzling out. So he expected Nora's pup would have died and disappeared long before his arrival. But on Nov. 1, a tour guide spied Nora-identifiable by her spots-and a pup. It would have been impossible for Nora to have had another pup, so Borras-Chavez knew it was the pup born two weeks ago."
In the fall of 2021, marine mammal ecologist Renato Borras-Chavez spotted a leopard seal and a newborn pup on an ice floe in Tierra del Fuego; the pup was dead and frozen to the ice. The mother repeatedly touched the pup and then fled into the water with her remaining pup. In 2023, Borras-Chavez and ecophysiologist Emily Sperou traveled to Laguna San Rafael National Park where ranger reports identified a female named LSR01 (Nora) that had birthed a pup on Oct. 18. No leopard seal pups born in Chile survive past infancy, so researchers expected disappearance, yet a tour guide later sighted Nora with the two-week-old pup, signaling rare survival amid fragile, rapidly breaking ice floes.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]