Telemetry on Wild Sea Lions: Facilities
The surgery location at the ASLC in Seward, Alaska is a special quarantine facility designed to house wild animals. This special facility prevents them from spreading disease to captive animals housed separately at ASLC and most importantly ensures they do catch or spread any disease back into the wild population once they are released. Veterinarians perform surgeries in a separate surgical container used only for the LHX project.
In 2016 we pioneered the conduct of this surgery at sea, with our portable surgical container placed aboard a research support vessel, the R/V Norseman. You can read a summary of this pioneering approach in this poster presented at the 2017 Alaska Marine Science Symposium by our veterinarian Dr. P. Tuomi:
Tuomi M, DiRocco S, Sattler R, Dahle S, Horning M (2017) Surgery at Sea - "Hawkeye" meets Vitus Bering.
