Did you know that the Falkland Islands are home to the largest population of South American fur seals in the world?
To understand dispersal and connectivity between the Falkland Islands and other South American fur seal populations, we have been busy deploying satellite tags on pups as part of a larger tracking project (funded by Darwin and the Winnifred Violet Scott Trust). Falkland fur seal pups are born in December. They wean when they are about 10 months of age - so anytime from late October onwards pups will leave home for the first time, and will likely stay at-sea for many months (although we don't really know for how long!). We deployed the satellite tags on Flat Jason Island (the Jason Islands Group is home to over 95% of the Falkland Islands fur seal population). Satellite tags are not super helpful if you want to look at fine-scale movements, for example over a couple of km, because they can have quite a large error (uncertainty) associated with each location. However, we we expect pups will disperse over hundred to thousands of kilometers. So, while although there is error associated with satellite tags (and we will need to account for with fancy mathematical models) - the error is much smaller than the scale at which we expect the pups will move. Fingers crossed the pups find plenty of fish and squid on their travels!
Feel free to reach out for any further information to info@saeri.ac.fk
This Project is funded by the UK Government through the Darwin Plus Fund