Profile

I live in Cambridge with my wife (who is a Marine Biologist and has dived under the ice in Antarctica and the Arctic) and our two children (Morten 7 and Freya 5).

I used to play a lot of sport but now my only exercise is my daily cycle to work and back, and the occasional kick about in the park with my children. I have traveled to some amazing places, with my work and just for fun. I love the water especially the sea, I love scuba diving, falling off a surfboard and just splashing about.

I am a biologist and I work with wildlife in the Antarctic such Seals, Penguins and Whales.

A lot of my work is on Bird Island but I have also been to the BAS bases on Signy and Rothera.

Most of my work is studying Antarctic fur seals using electronic devices to understand what these animals get up to when they are at sea feeding. These animals were hunted to near extinction for their fur but have since made a remarkable recovery to number in their millions. However they now face new challenges, especially climate change.

Antarctic fur seal pups

The beach, covered in seals, in front of the base on Bird Island where I work!

A typical day for me depends where I am.  One of the nice things about my job is how varied it can be. No one day is the same.

In Cambridge at the headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey my days will involve:

• Meeting my PhD students, catching up and seeing how they are getting on.
• Coding with R (a computer programme that helps me analyze my data).
• Writing scientific papers (this is how I share the things I discover with other scientists).
• Reading scientific papers other people have written (using their information to help me).
• Making maps of where the seals have gone.
• Talking to the researchers in Antarctica to find out how the animals are doing.
• Learning new skills (reading books, online courses etc)

A video of some leopard seals I tracked. The coloured dots represent the daily position of each seal over a year. You can see them moving from Bird Island, where we put the tags on, to the Antarctic Continent.

In Antarctica things would be very different a few examples of things I would get up to are:

• Check the weather, this will determine what we need to and what we can actually do.
• Walking on the the beach to see which seals and penguins have left to go to sea and which ones have returned.
• record, weigh, measure all the new seal pups that have been born.
• Check the penguin nests to count eggs laid, chicks hatched etc.
• attach electronic loggers onto seals or penguins that can tell us what they are up to at sea.
• Checking the leg rings of breeding Albatrosses

Working at the study beach where we can safely work in and around the seals.

The base at Bird Island where I work a lot of the time.

I also have jobs to keep the field camp going for example:

• First thing in the morning, I will need to light the stove to warm things up and make breakfast.
• Cleaning the water filters to ensure we have fresh clean water to drink.
• Refuelling the generators, to charge laptops and radios.
• Downloading emails via the satellite phone, a very slow process.
• Heating water to have a wash (warming a bucket of water to clean myself with).
  

  Sometimes we have to camp in the Antarctic. I spent 3 months living here!

Elephant seals have a different approach to bathing than me!