Fewer Weddell seals than previously thought
Led by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the team of citizen scientists used hundreds of high-resolution satellite images of areas of the Antarctica to manually count the seals.
Publishing a paper on their findings in the Science Advances journal, the researchers concluded that there were about 202,000 sub-adult and adult female Weddell seals in Antarctica in November 2011. This number contrasts with previous estimates of female Weddell seals at about 800,000.