From a distance, a seal appears to be napping on the rust-coloured rocks; members of its small colony grunt at one another as sea spray brings some respite from the searing midsummer heat. But on closer inspection, one of the seal’s eyes is open and pointing vacantly at the sky.
Tess Gridley bends over the dead animal, and instructs her university students and volunteers to check for parasites. Fewer bugs means a fresher carcass, which is what these researchers are looking for. Binoculars pressed to her face, Gridley scans the rocky outcrop and finds five more bodies, which the students line up on the rocks in a funereal procession. “A colony of this size, you wouldn’t expect to see so many freshly dead,” she says.
Gridley and her team have travelled to this stretch of Western Cape province to investigate why thousands of Cape fur seals have been washing up along South Africa’s shores. When a wave of deaths started in September 2021, Gridley, a behavioural biologist and director of research organisation SeaSearch, paused her work on whale and dolphin acoustics to help deal with the unfolding crisis. For months she has walked miles of coastline, picking through seal bodies, searching for clues.
Now, with jars of formalin at the ready, and gloved up to the elbows, she and her team prepare to add six more seals to their evidence base. Slicing into the first animal, they peel back the blubber and muscle. In the stench and heat, they take samples of lungs, liver, stomach, heart. A bright crimson stream makes its way from the body back to the sea. Gridley, meanwhile, is focused on an especially grim task: extracting the brain. “Where’s that axe?” she asks. Somebody hands it to her. Gripping the…