As the end of the summer draws ever closer, our team at Davis has had a rare and very unexpected surprise. Yesterday James Hamilton found one of our CTD-SRDLs (a seal tag) on Mule Island (-68.650, 77.833) to the southwest of Davis station in an old seal wallow. The tag was deployed on a male elephant seal on 06 February 2012 during a previous expedition to Davis. This seal, W6211, weighed 600 kilograms, was 3.27 metres long and had a rather substantial girth of 2.6 metres.
Recovering these tags is a wonderful bonus given that in addition to the data that has already been transmitted through ARGOS we are able to recover high-resolution information recorded at 4-second intervals from the instrument. Not only is this a great boost in terms of data recovery but it also means that we have an extra instrument to deploy on future expeditions.