Antarctic fur seals

Pinnipeds are notoriously difficult to study, being semi-aquatic, often highly agressive and breeding in remote and densely-packed colonies.  However, my collaborators at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have constructed a scaffold walkway above a colony of Antarctic fur seals at Bird Island, South Georgia, allowing all of the animals that come ashore to be studied without disturbing the colony as a whole.  Over the past 15 years, genetic samples have been collected and analysed to discover the parentage of over a thousand pups.  A remarkable picture of breeding behaviour has emerged.  The most successful males appear to arrive first in the colony, stay for more days per season and come ashore for more seasons in total.  However, although the traditional picture is one in which males fight each other for access to females, the opposite appears to be true; males stay rooted to the spot while females appear to actively choose their partners.  We have also shown that vitrually every aspect of individual fitness examined to date, ranging from territory-holiding ability, body size, reproductive success and attractiveness in males to early survival and accession to breeding in females, correlates with genetic heterozygosity.  Consequently, a recent focus of this study has been to develop genomic tools with which to explore this phenomenon in more detail.