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As we get further into the cold season, at least those of us who are up in the Northern Hemisphere, we have a chilly episode to make your holidays exciting.
Get ready because we're sharing The Great Seal Count, which you can also hear in Spanish, by the way.
Enjoy and see you in the new year.
Hi, I'm Lindsay, and I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Today we're discovering how to count the cutest seals on the planet from your own home.
The cutest seals, you say?
Yep, they live in Antarctica, and they look like puppies with fins instead of legs.
Aw, that's cute! So, how do we count seals, and why?
That's what we're about to find out.
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When I called up Leo Salas, a scientist who helped lead the first -ever global count of Weddell seals, I asked the hardest question first. What are Weddell seals and why are they so cute?
They're the cutest seals on the planet.
So yes, they're the cutest of all these seals.
There are, as you know, many kinds of - Oh come on!
I feel like you just set him up to say that Weddell seals are the cutest seals on the Well, he agreed with me right away, so I figure he's right.
And Weddell seals are undeniably adorable.
They have big, puppy -like eyes, long whiskers, smushy faces, and chunky furry bodies.
So are they certified chunksters?
Definitely. Weddell seals are one of the most famous species in Antarctica.
Maybe, because they photograph so well.
Because they are so far south and nothing else lives over there, they're super friendly so you can take those beautiful pictures.
So kind of like a fashion photographer, going like, Seals, look over here, baby!
You're beautiful, you're beautiful!
Work that blubber! Work it, if you got it, flaunt it.
Even though seals don't mind having their photos taken, very few people are allowed to get close enough to photograph them.
The animals in Antarctica are protected.
You cannot just walk up to them.
Besides, it's a very, very, very dangerous place.
So you're saying these seals are dangerously cute.
Yes, especially the babies or as I like to call them, the widdle -wettles.
Widdle seals go to the same patch of ice every year to have their adorable babies and they're very, very far south.
No other mammal reads as far south as the widdle seal.
So they're like the ultimate southerners?
Yes. Scientists have studied these seals for many years, but no one knows quite how many there are, and if their numbers are going up or down.
That's why Leo and other scientists wanted to count them.
We wanted to know what are the chances that something that we do, humans do, may cause the seals to be affected one way or another.
OK. So let me see if I get this counting seals can help us understand if something humans are doing is Helping or hurting the seals?
Exactly, but how could we be hurting seals?
I mean most of us don't live anywhere near Antarctica That's true, but we may be eating one of the seals favorite foods It's called the tooth fish.
The tooth fish. Is that like just like a tooth with fins?
That would be hilarious, but no. As far as I can tell, it's called that because it has teeth.
But toothfish isn't the name that most people know this fish by.
If you go to the market they will not call it toothfish because that's too ugly a name.
They call it Chilean sea bass.
Really? I feel like I've seen Chilean sea bass on the menus of restaurants.
It's like really expensive fish and you get it in fancy places where waiters have ties.
But it's neither seabass, most certainly nor Chilean.
But they call it that because it sounds like, you know, when you go, it's Chilean seabass.
Wow. So Leo's saying seals eat this fish as toothfish.
But we eat it as a Chilean sea bass, which is not where it's from, nor the kind of fish that it is.
That's correct. If you see a Chilean sea bass in most cases, it came from Antarctica.
And that fact makes a big difference to the seals because this fish isn't just a fancy treat to them It's an important meal that feeds their families This fish is big it can grow up to six feet or more and weight, you know, a lot of pounds Wait, so how many pounds is a lot of pounds like ten?
No, they can get up to almost 300 pounds or 135 kilograms That's like two people.
The seals, which are big animals, they're four meters long, 12 feet or more, they can grab that fish and eat it.
Okay, wow so like everything here is much bigger than I thought.
It's a huge seal eating a huge fish.
Yes, the toothfish are twice as big as any other fish nearby.
Those fish to grow that big, they eat other fish.
Recently, scientists have noticed something about the smaller fish that the toothfish eats.
There's more of them than there used to be.
So we know that something is being altered in the food web.
Wait. So what's a food web?
A food web is all the connections between living things and an ecosystem through feeding.
So like who's eating who?
Exactly. It's a delicate balance.
Leo and other scientists suspected that humans were tipping it off by becoming toothfish's new predators.
But to find out they needed to know if the number of seals go down as more toothfish or Chilean sea bass are fished.
So it's like a scale as one end goes up the other end goes down.
Exactly. But getting a clear picture in a complex food web is is easier said than done.
It is kind of like trying to figure out how many socks are in the drawer.
And it's a very, very, very, very big drawer.
And you're almost blind and you're wearing mittens.
I mean, that's what I do every morning.
So I have no problem understanding what he's talking about.
Just got to get the blindfold on, put on the mittens and count the massive drawer full of socks.
I always think that really slows down your morning.
Just got to wake up four hours earlier.
That's important those socks get counted.
But what Leo is really saying is that there's so much we don't understand about how this food web works.
Getting an accurate seal count is the first step to removing the blindfolds.
Yeah, isn't the number of animals like the first thing you want to know about big famous animal species?
Like when you open up the zoo book, there's always 10 ,000 to 30 ,000 in Africa.
Weddell seals have proved hard to count because of their environment.
things. We cannot do it in person.
We cannot go and fly or sail to where they are because it's very dangerous, very, very dangerous.
Oh yeah, there's the slippery ice and all that and the bitter cold.
Right. Scientists had attempted to count the seals before, but Leo had reason to believe that the last count was too high.
There was an estimate of the abundance of the seals in the entire continent based on counts made by helicopter.
Counting by helicopter?
That sounds cooler than counting on land, for sure.
They flew over areas that they knew would find seals, counted a number, and then estimated that there may be 800 ,000 or 900 ,000 seals.
The Heli -Counters flew over a couple of areas with seals, took photos, and counted them.
Then they multiplied that out over the rest of the continent.
The problem is that that's not how seals are found on the ice.
They clump. In other words, there's not an equal amount of seals across every part of Antarctica, so Leo suspected that that number, 800 to 900 ,000, was an overestimate.
OK, it's like if you were to estimate how many people live in America by counting people in New York City and multiply that by how many New York Cities could fit in America and how that would be, like, way too many people.
Exactly! Leo and his colleagues wanted to correct that number.
One of them, a scientist named Dr. Michelle LaRue, had a new idea.
She said, Hey, let's take these satellite pictures and count them there.
Satellite pictures are taken all the way from space, but if you zoom way in, you can see widdle seals.
They look like widdle gray commas.
Cute as punctuation ever.
Yes, but this idea had a widdle problem.
Okay, that's great.
But there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures and that's also a lot of work.
Yeah, looking for little grey commas in thousands of photos would get really tiring, I think.
So the scientists decided to ask for help.
So she said, OK, let's see people around the world if we give them the photos, could they come for us?
Wait, so how would that work?
Would people just like stand on the street corner and hand out copies of satellite images being like, help us count the seals.
Won't you help us count the seals?
These aren't just people on the street.
They're citizen scientists, who are regular people, but they want to help scientists collect data.
And they do it from the comfort of their own homes, and in their communities.
All they had to do was sign up on a website and click through the images.
So that's what we did.
The scientists put 20 ,000 satellite images on a website that was created to, get this, find the tomb of Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan.
What? This story just took a turn.
So what does Genghis Khan's tomb have to do with seals?
Are seals like hanging out by the tomb?
No. Is he buried in Antarctica?
How'd they get there?
No. Believe it or not, you can find signs of both seals and hidden tombs through satellite images.
The Tomb Hunters created the Citizen Science website.
Then opened it up to scientists around the world.
That's so cool but please, I need to know, did anyone find Ghengis Khan's tomb?
They did find many tombs, but none of them is the one they were looking for.
Well that's something.
So tomb hunting and seal counting are really not so different.
Apparently not. Back to the seals, tons of people signed up to be Antarctic citizen scientists from home!
And they went in there and they clicked and said, I see a seal here and I see a seal here and a seal seal there and we got those numbers.
And many hands make light work or many eyes count seals faster...
as the saying goes.
So how many seals were there?
About 200 ,000 in the entire continent.
Well, so that's a lot less than 8 to 900 ,000.
So now that they have that number, like, what comes next?
What do they do with it?
They'll try to predict the changes in the food web by comparing their seal count to the number of toothfish caught by fishing boats.
If we know how many fish we're removing, we can say, oh, there should be this many fewer seals.
Then they can do a similar thing for other Antarctic species, like penguins or orcas.
Well, I get it. So it's a way to connect the dots between different species in the ecosystem and try to understand how our being in the food web affects all of them.
Exactly. And if the scientists find that our fishing is affecting the seals, it might change how many toothfish people can catch. Or how much Chilean sea bass we eat.
Yeah, and that's possible thanks to citizen scientists.
Leo told me he was furiously impressed with their work.
I was humbled by this experience in knowing that there are so many people who are so careful and motivated and inspired to do an amazing job.
It's incredible. Wow, so it doesn't take a fancy science degree to help do seal science, just the skill of clicking on screens, which, honestly, we're all getting a lot of practice at.
We are. Leo says citizen science is also a way to get involved with conservation, protecting Earth for future generations.
And so long we provide the means for people to do so.
They learn more, they care more, they participate more and they protect more.
So that's my hope. I bet the Whittleseels hope that people protect more, too.
Yeah. From a safe, non -slippery distance.
You may have heard some interesting sounds in the music in this episode.
Sounds like this one.
That sound is actually from a Weddell seal!
It sounds like something out of science fiction, but these are actually seal sounds that they make underwater to communicate.
Now can you hear the seals and the music?
Thanks today to Dr. Leo Salas, quantitative ecologist at Blue Point Conservation Science.
And special thanks to the Weddell Seal Science Project which provided the seal recordings.
The seal count project is over for now, but you can still become a citizen scientist in almost any area of science.
We'll have links to our favorite websites to find citizen science projects on our website, SciencePodcastForKids .com.
Want to learn more about Weddle seals?
Tune into our bonus interview episode with Leo when you pledge $1 a month or more on patreon .com slash Tumble podcast. They're on our ad free feed.
Sarah Roberson Lentz edited this episode.
Erik Kuhn is our engineer and mixer and I'm Lindsey Patterson and I wrote this episode.
And I'm Marshall Escamilla and I made all the music.
Tumble is a production of Tumble Media.
Thanks for listening and tune in next time for more stories of science discovery.
All right, hey folks, you know what time it is, it's time for birthday shout -outs for our lovely supporters on Patreon.
Happy birthday to Ava on December 20th!
Mommy, Daddy, Aidan and Henry love you so much and are so excited to see what year eight of your amazing life has in store for you.
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Mom, dad and all your aunties and uncles think you are a stellar big brother, cousin and chess partner.
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Mom and dad send you some birthday hugs.
Ava, happy birthday on December 27.
Never stop asking questions.
you could make the next big discovery.
Happy Birthday to Alice on December 28th.
Mom and Dad are so proud of who you are.
Stay curious and keep learning forever.
And Happy Birthday to Ryder on December 28th.
Mom and Dad love you so much. We can't wait to see what you'll discover.
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