‘Elephant Seals of Campbell Island’ from Cape Expedition, Scientific Results of the New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Expedition, 1941-45. No. 6

1950

Expedition Reports Q115 C36 1941

Wellington: DSIR

As well as ‘keeping an eye out’ for German warships, the expedition teams on Campbell and Auckland Islands provided daily weather reports while collecting scientific data on the environment and wildlife. Naturalist Jack Sorensen recorded information on the elephant seals of Campbell Islands. His paper was published by the Cape Expedition Reports Committee in 1950. Numbers of elephant seals had been greatly depleted in the islands of the Southern Pacific Ocean during the height of the sealing industry in the 19th century. However in the early 1940s Sorensen found that the population on Campbell Island had recovered somewhat – ‘So plentiful are the animals now…that the shores are never entirely deserted’.