YOU might think male elephant seals are odd-looking enough without polar researchers glueing a box of electronic sensors to the top of their heads.
While the boxes do nothing for the seals’ looks, they are allowing a team led by Jean-Benoit Charrassin at the French Natural History Museum in Paris to collect data on inaccessible areas of the Antarctic. They record the temperature and salinity of the water each time the seals dive for food. The information is sent to the researchers via satellite whenever the seals surface.
The team hopes the data will help monitor how the Southern Ocean…
