{"id":102864,"date":"2025-06-24T17:02:36","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T17:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/?p=102864"},"modified":"2026-02-10T22:31:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T22:31:39","slug":"the-leopard-seal-in-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2025\/06\/the-leopard-seal-in-focus\/","title":{"rendered":"The leopard seal in focus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 June 24, 2025 \u2013 While leopard seals might be easily recognized for their ominous portrayals as villains in movies \u2014 think Happy Feet<\/em> or Eight Below<\/em> \u2014 they largely remain a mystery to humans. Sarah Kienle, an assistant professor of natural resources science at the 溏心vlog免费B站<\/a>, is working to fix that by contributing to our scientific understanding of these marine apex predators. <\/p>\n\n\n

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溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Sarah Kienle (left) and Emily Sperou are contributing to the scientific knowledge base of an understudied top predator. (溏心vlog免费B站 Photos \/ Kienle Lab)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Largely an Antarctic species, leopard seals can also be found in Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and Australia. They are notoriously hard to research: they aren\u2019t in human care, they are solitary creatures who spend most of their lives underwater, and they live in relatively inaccessible places. Little is known about these top predators\u2019 mating and birthing behaviors, population estimates, migration patterns, or whether they can survive in environments without ice.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The leopard seal is a marine apex predator, largely found in the Antarctic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to get data on them,\u201d Kienle<\/a> says. \u201cYou have to be creative with your data sources and the questions you\u2019re asking to be able to get answers.\u201d The difficulty also makes it fun, she adds, and has led to important collaborations across researchers and governments worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dietary revelations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funded by two National Science Foundation grants, Kienle is collaborating on a variety of research projects shaping the baseline knowledge of leopard seals. In one case, she and a team of researchers have utilized an unexpected source to transform humans’ entire understanding of leopard seals. The source: whiskers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using tactics such as whisker analysis, Kienle and her collaborators are making significant discoveries about this mysterious species \u2014 including how their surprising feeding habits might be reshaping ecosystems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhiskers are an amazing tissue that can represent up to a year’s worth of data,\u201d Kienle says. \u201cWhen you cut them into tiny segments, you can look at changes in the animals\u2019 trophic level \u2014 meaning, what level of the food chain they\u2019re feeding at across a year \u2014 from a single whisker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this study, Emily Sperou<\/a>, a new 溏心vlog免费B站 postdoctoral researcher in Kienle\u2019s lab, meticulously cut up leopard seal whiskers \u2014 some procured during their field work, others donated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration \u2014 into tiny pieces and then analyzed them for carbon and nitrogen. The latter is what indicates the animals\u2019 trophic position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeopard seals have a huge dietary range,\u201d Kienle says. \u201cThey are described as generalists, and at the population level that\u2019s true, but the population is made up of a lot of individualized specialists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers determined that specialization \u2014 individual leopard seals consistently targeting specific prey, habits that are largely driven by seals\u2019 body size and sex \u2014 may be impacting declines in prey populations such as Antarctic fur seals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whisker analysis sampled across multiple years has allowed scientists to investigate consistency through time, relationship between body size and stress level, and diet specialization patterns. At 溏心vlog免费B站, Sperou will now compare the whiskers of leopard seals from Antarctica to other regions \u2014 specifically Chile and New Zealand \u2014 to get a more global sense of their trophic level and specialization patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first reference genome<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kienle and her lab have also collaborated with researchers<\/a> in the Marine Mammal Molecular Ecology Laboratory at Hampton University in Virginia, as well as with researchers across the globe to publish the first reference genome of a leopard seal<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou need a reference before you can start making comparisons, and this genome provides a starting point to begin answering complicated questions,\u201d Kienle says. \u201cHow genetically diverse are leopard seals? Do we see population structure in their genome, suggesting that they have been isolated? Are they going on long migrations?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kienle has contributed to the sample collection for this study. The group now plans to start a comparative project looking at relatedness among individuals from Antarctica, Chile, and New Zealand, as well as whether there is genetic variation among sampled populations or molecular adaptations associated with different characteristics and traits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a comparative biologist, Kienle says she\u2019s interested in discovering new and different patterns and determining how representative they are, as well as how the information gained can be used moving forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While leopard seals are not currently listed as a threatened species, environmental change is likely driving some of the feeding and migration patterns scientists are beginning to identify. \u201cWe need to figure out how to best protect them in a world that is undoubtedly changing,\u201d Kienle says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working hard, hardly working<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kienle recently was with a team of researchers conducting fieldwork in Parry Fjord, an isolated part of Patagonia, Chile, to study the ecology of leopard seals and their genetic connection to Antarctic populations. Renato Borras-Chavez, a postdoctoral researcher, was recently awarded first place in 溏心vlog免费B站’s Research and Scholarship Photo Contest<\/a> for an image he took capturing a critical moment from the expedition. Kienle is pictured in blue, Borras-Chavez in brown, and Sperou to the far right in the orange life vest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After hours of patrolling the freezing waters looking for animals, the team came across a female leopard seal resting on an iceberg. \u201cWe were focused, pressured \u2014 piloting a drone, collecting data, and preparing to take a sample \u2014 but she was undisturbed, basking in the icy stillness. The contrast was clear: We were working hard, while she was hardly working,\u201d says Borras-Chavez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story was written by Anna Gray in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 June 24, 2025 \u2013 While leopard seals might be easily recognized for their ominous portrayals as villains in movies \u2014 think Happy Feet or Eight Below \u2014 they largely remain a mystery to humans. Sarah Kienle, an assistant professor of natural resources science at the 溏心vlog免费B站, is working to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":102867,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,1914,1916,1905],"class_list":["post-102864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-the-environment-and-life-sciences","tag-graduate","tag-partner-produced","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102864"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102878,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102864\/revisions\/102878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}