When Burney Le Boeuf started studying elephant seals in 1968, his operation was pretty low tech. Le Boeuf was surveying 4,000-pound bulls at a rookery on Año Nuevo Island off the coast of California, and he had to find a way to tag them so that he would know which bull was which. First he tried a dye-filled fire extinguisher, which he blasted at the sleeping bulls’ flanks. But that woke them up. Then he threw plastic sandwich bags filled with paint at them--too messy. Then he tried a paint roller on a pole, which afforded a bit more control over the shape and placement of the marks. But he ran out of enough colors to give each seal a distinctive mark. Finally he settled on squirt bottles of hydrogen peroxide mixed with Lady Clairol Blue, a hair bleach. It bleaches fast if it’s sunny out, says Le Boeuf. And you can form nice letters with it.
Today his grad students still use Lady Clairol Blue to mark the elephant seals, but Le Boeuf has moved on to more sophisticated equipment. And as his technology has improved, Le Boeuf has been able to get a better picture of what turns out to be a bizarre, often inexplicable way of life.
At first glance, elephant seals don’t seem like they have much to hide. Each year in late December hundreds of them come to Año Nuevo for their three-month mating season, and they sprawl on the beach in plain view of thousands of tourists. All Le Boeuf has to do to observe his subjects in action is get in his car on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz and drive 19 miles north on Route 1.
