A Life of Extremes: The life and times of a polar filmmaker by Max Quinn

Author:Max Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd

Emma Turner outside her newly built igloo. Max Quinn

An hour later it was time to start up the winch and see what, if anything, was on the line. To our surprise Art bagged five whoppers. I grabbed my pole camera and dipped it into the ice hole to record surprisingly good underwater shots of these cod-like giants being winched to the surface. The fish were then weighed and measured; the largest was a spectacular 50 kilograms, although small fry compared to his greatest catch — a giant of 100 kilos. They were gently placed into holding tanks and driven to his aquarium where he would extract and study the antifreeze glycoproteins in their blood. A long-term goal of this research was that it could prove useful in medicine, as a refrigerant for red blood cells and tissue.

Buoyed by the success of our toothfish filming, I was keen to check out another US science project inside a lonely canvas shelter called a Jamesway, set up far out on the sea ice. The researchers from the University of Texas called it Weddell World, and what was going on inside was ingenious. The team had drilled a large hole through the sea ice at one end of the interior, into which a beautiful female Weddell seal was happily ensconced. Strapped to her back was a bridle that carried a small videotape camera and other data recorders that showed depth, distance, speed and even her heart rate when she was foraging for food.

When the seal was snoozing, which was most of the time, assistants Terrie Williams and Lee Fuiman would carefully open the video mechanism using long rods and insert a small videotape into a watertight compartment. Later when the seal awoke, she would dive under and head off on one of her hunting trips, unaware her every action was being recorded.

The principal investigator, Randy Davis, said the seal would be gone only as long as she could hold her breath. I asked how they guaranteed the seal would return to them, but they had already worked that out. Being air breathing, seals won’t go too far from their hole so the researchers had deliberately set up their camp far from open water, knowing she would always return to their Jamesway to gulp in her next breath. Sure enough, twenty minutes later she popped up and soon went back into snooze mode.

Lee expertly extracted the tape and inserted it into a video machine. We crowded around as the tape was shuttled through. What we saw blew everyone away. There on the screen was the first footage of a Weddell’s hunting strategy filmed from the seal’s point of view. It showed astonishing shots of the seal picking off Antarctic silverfish like shooting fish in a barrel. Then a moment that astonished us all: a giant toothfish suddenly loomed into view and the seal snapped at it — proof that seals do hunt toothfish if given the opportunity and providing an unexpected link to the scene I had shot with Art the day before.

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