16 EDWARD A. WILSON. 



as might have resulted from the attack of a Killer Whale, on Weddell's Seal. 

 Some no doubt fall victims to these voracious animals on the coast and at the 

 edges of the unbroken ice, and probably if attacked at all they would have a smaller 

 chance of escaping with wounds only than would the more agile Lobodon or 

 Stenorhinchus. Some, too, no doubt, get carried off to sea on drifting floes from time 

 to time while sleeping and fall a prey to the Killers in making their way back to 

 shore, but the account I have given above applies to the great majority, and it is in 

 them that habit is adapting itself to circumstances in a way not yet appreciated by the 

 other species. 



I have mentioned that Weddell's Seal during the winter months spends most of 

 its time in the water beneath the ice. We arrived at this fact in various ways. They 

 were rarely found on the ice in the neighbourhood of their blow-holes or of the tide 

 cracks, yet they kept these blow-holes open, and could be harpooned as they came 

 up to breathe, all through the winter months. In addition to this we had other 

 evidence. Our ears, for instance, convinced us that seals were with us in considerable 

 numbers, though they so rarely showed themselves. Again and again while sitting up 

 at night as meteorological observers, in the silence which reigned when others were 

 asleep, we would hear the gurgling, bubbling, guttural notes of Weddell's Seal 

 beneath the ship, sounds which we knew so well from having often watched the seals 

 as they made them. There was no mistaking them, nor did anyone fail to hear 

 them, and they were not to be confounded in the dead stillness of the night with the 

 contraction of the rigging or the movements of the ice or ship. Sometimes one would 

 hear definite thuds beneath the ship, the seals bumping against the timbers as we had 

 often heard them bump against the ice. At other times, and almost at any time out 

 on the sea-ice, if we stooped to listen with an ear to the floe, we could hear the guttural 

 notes of the seal, or its bubbling trill, or the thud of a seal's head given, we imagined, 

 by way of signal to its fellows. All these noises were carried by the ice to considerable 

 distances, and, as it seemed, formed a simple system of communication between seal and 

 seal through the medium of the solid ice. Sometimes also, as we walked along a frozen 

 crack, we would be arrested by the scrunching noise of seals' teeth opening up new ice 

 in the crack to form a blow-hole. 



As early spring approached, and we began to go farther afield during the short 

 hours of approaching day, we realised that more seals were leaving the water to bask in 

 the scanty sunlight. If then we followed one of the scars formed across the strait by 

 the re-freezing of a crack, we would find a series of blow-holes and holes for egress 

 and ingress averaging 180 yards apart. About every third hole would be enlarged to 

 allow a seal to leave or enter the water, and round these there was abundant evidence 

 of occupation during the winter months, even if no seal was actually lying there when 

 we approached. 



To give an example of one of these refrozen cracks, on June 18th we made 

 a list of all the seal holes discoverable in a scar that ran for some miles to the 



