The term "group," to designate male seals in a certain body 

 length range, was introduced by Kenyon et al. (1954:15). 

 "Group III," for example, included seals 41 to 45% in (104 to 

 116 cm) in length, a group formerly known as "3-year-olds." 

 At the end of the 1961 season, the practice of measuring body 

 length was abandoned. 



While studies of the tooth-ridge technique were under way 

 in 1949, a parallel investigation was being made of ways to esti- 

 mate the age composition of the kill from skin weight and 

 from baculum size. (The baculum method had been tested 

 briefly in 1944.) For two kills that included about 3,000 males, 

 the freshly blubbered skins of 1,000 were weighed and the 

 cleaned bacula of 1,000 were measured. The results suggested 

 a bimodal distribution, i.e., two important age classes in the 

 kill, but could not be satisfactorily analyzed. Further study 

 was dropped. 



On 2 July 1949 at Northeast Point, 5,329 sealskins were 

 taken, a record kill for any single day in the 20th century. 



The area occupied by breeding seals on all rookeries had been 

 measured the previous summer (1948). Now, to obtain an esti- 

 mate of the area occupied by one pup, the biologists counted, 

 on 9-1 1 August, live and dead pups on six sample rookeries on 

 St. Paul Island: Lukanin, Kitovi, Polovina and Little Polovina, 

 Morjovi, and Zapadni Reef. They counted live pups partly by 

 making them run the gantlet and partly by scanning groups 

 from a high vantage point. They counted dead pups by walking 

 over the six rookeries and adjacent hauling grounds, dropping 

 a pinch of lime on each carcass (Fig. 7 bottom). 



Up to 1949, population studies of the seal herd had been car- 

 ried on by biologists with limited training in methods of statis- 

 tical design and analysis. In fact, wildlife research in the Uni- 

 ted States was only then entering the computer age; in this 

 respect lagging behind agricultural research. In 1949, Z. 

 William Birnbaum, director of the Laboratory of Statistical 

 Research at the University of Washington, kindly agreed to 

 look at a sample fur seal problem. He applied Pearson Type 

 III curves (Kendall and Stuart 1965:152) to the kills of "3- 

 year" (actually Group III) males in 1938 and 1948, and esti- 

 mated that the postseason escapements were, respectively, 

 15.4% and 18.3%. One of Birnbaum's staff, Douglas G. 

 Chapman, became chief consultant to the fur seal program in 

 1950. 



The pregnancy rate in fur seals had always been regarded as 

 100%. At the request of the biologists, the St. Paul Island 

 agent conducted a kill of 100 female seals on 27 October 1949. 

 He shipped to Seattle the frozen genital tracts and teeth. Biolo- 

 gists fixed half of the tracts in Formalin and half in Bouin's 

 solution and forwarded them to Anita K. Pearson, then work- 

 ing with Enders at Swarthmore College. Of the 100 seals, 1 was 

 a 2-yr-old; the others were 4-yr-olds or older. 



From gross examination of the uterine horns, Kenyon con- 

 cluded that 83 of the 99 had borne a pup in 1949. Later, Pear- 

 son wrote that, from examination of ovaries as well as horns, 

 93 had borne a pup. And on 13 May 1950, Harry May (Fouke 

 Fur Company) sorted the salted, blubbered skins of the cows 

 into two piles: 92 "nursing" skins and 8 "nonnursing" skins. 

 It was perhaps coincidental that Pearson and May found simi- 

 lar pregnancy rates. Scheffer examined the skins along with 

 May and concluded that some borderline skins could not sure- 

 ly be identified as those of nursing individuals. At any rate, the 

 100-cow kill of 1949 produced evidence, later to be amplified, 



that the overall pregnancy rate is < 100%, over a period of 

 several years (Abegglen and Roppel 1959, table 2, p. 76). 



Special kills on St. Paul Island to provide female reproduc- 

 tive tracts were again made in 1951 and 1952. In the mean- 

 while, tracts or reproductive records were coming into the 

 laboratory from seals killed accidentally during the regular 

 seasons of 1950-52, from seals killed by natives at Sitka in 1950 

 and 1951, and from seals taken at sea during the 1952 pelagic 

 investigation. By the time Kenyon had assembled his data at 

 the end of 1952, he was able to show that, in 894 females sam- 

 pled in their fourth year or later, the mean pregnancy rate was 

 69% (Kenyon et al. 1954:34). 



Among endoparasites which he found in seal viscera sent to 

 him in 1949, John T. Lucker, Bureau of Animal Industry, 

 U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that he found filariid 

 worms, hitherto unknown from the fur seal. They were larval 

 forms in a spleen and could not be identified. Microfilariae 

 were next observed in blood of a fur seal killed in the Seattle 

 Zoo on 7 February 1958. Anderson (1959) concluded that slen- 

 der, thready worms from the testicular sheath of a fur seal were 

 similar to, if not the same as, Dipetalonema ( = Filaria) spiro- 

 cauda (Leidy, 1858), hitherto known only from the harbor 

 seal, Phoca vitulina. 



We note for the record that the seal tags used in 1949 were 

 mistakenly stamped "CS", for C Series, whereas a simple 

 "C" had been ordered. 



1950 



The year 1950 opened with outstandingly the coldest, snow- 

 iest month in the 60 yr of Washington State climatic records. 

 The emaciated bodies of 29 tagged yearling fur seals were re- 

 covered from Washington-Oregon beaches in January and 

 February, suggesting that about 700 tagged as well as untagged 

 yearlings had stranded there (Scheffer 1950b). Here was evi- 

 dence that exposure and starvation may be important factors 

 in juvenile mortality among seals. On 3 February 1950, 

 Kenyon and Scheffer flew in a U.S. Coast Guard airplane 

 (PBY-5A) from Port Angeles, Wash., to the California-Ore- 

 gon border and back to look for any unusual distribution of 

 seals as a result of the cold weather. From an altitude of about 

 200 ft (60 m) they counted 85 seals, mostly solitary, mostly 

 along the edge of the continental shelf. They saw no dead 

 seals. 



Early in 1950, plans were made to tap a new source of re- 

 search information, namely, pelagic sealing by aborigines. The 

 main objective was to investigate the pregnancy rate of females 

 killed on their winter feeding grounds. A sample taken here 

 should, in theory, be more representative of the female class 

 than one taken on the Pribilof "maternity wards." Through- 

 out history, aborigines living along the west coast of North 

 America have been privileged to hunt fur seals by primitive 

 methods. The "aborigines" (Aleuts and Indians) are no longer 

 primitive and they rarely exercise the privilege of sealing. We 

 have mentioned that fur seal stomachs were purchased in the 

 1930's, from Indians of La Push, Vancouver Island, and 

 Sitka. 



Between 24 March and 1 April 1950, Kenyon collected stom- 

 achs, genital tracts, fetuses, and other parts, as well as mea- 

 surements, from 41 seals killed by Tlingits in Crawfish Inlet, 

 25 mi from Sitka. He found that all seals were adult females 

 and that 31 (76%) were pregnant. The stomach contents were 



35 



