Portrait in Blubber

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 ...