Zoology Jottings: THE SEALS AND THE SCIENTISTS. A 1979 Book About an Important Study in 1950 on Lactation and Growth in the Grey Seal

Around 4 o’clock on days he was in Amo¹ with cigar burning brightly in his hand would wander into the coffee room for tea and regale us with stories of his exploits, of his enemies and of his mishaps. Several were about his work on seals on Ramsey, an island off the Welsh coast, in the late 1940s to early 1950s. Amo and his colleagues were the first to study the growth of the young seal in relation to the transfer of nutrients from the fat reserves of the mother. During a period of a few weeks when the pup grows from around 14 kg to over 50 kg the mother does not feed. All the pup’s growth and energy expenditure comes from the mother’s reserves. As one grows, the other shrinks. The fat-rich milk (1½ times the concentration in double cream) can only be described as having the consistency of emulsion paint with the smell of none too fresh fish. (For anybody contemplating working on pinniped milk my advice is not to use a mouth pipette; take it from one who knows.)

The take home message from the study was that about half the loss of weight of the mother manifests itself as growth of the pup. The other half fuels the mother’s and the pup’s energy requirements. However, having got that bit over most of Amo’s stories involved interactions with the locals who were utterly mystified by the comings and goings of these strangers to the offshore island.

What I did not know when I left in 1978—and have only recently discovered—was that an account of the work on the seals and on the scientists who took part was published by Leonard ‘Leo’ Harrison Matthews², his principal collaborator. The book, The Seals and the Scientists, appeared in 1979 (London: Peter Owen). It covers other studies on seals around the British coast and is beautifully written in a style that has long died out. One can almost see Matthews wearing his cape and carrying his swordstick on a trip to the publisher.

Matthews explained how the idea of penning a mother seal in a weighable cage on or near the beach and then weighing both mother and pup, while also taking milk samples, came about:

Professor Amoroso was sitting with me beside the fire in my study at Bristol one stormy winter evening in 1949. We were enjoying biological gossip over a jorum of hot rum and after discussing some puzzling things I had found in the insides of Basking sharks I had cut up with Gavin Maxwell on the island of Soay off the coast of Skye, the talk came round to the seals I had been studying in west Wales. He was Professor of Physiology at the Royal Veterinary College in London and was used to handling many kinds of strange animals, but had never had any dealings with seals.

After preliminary trips with various people interested in seals and decisions made on what was needed, the heavy equipment was made in Amo’s department’s workshop. Matthews described the party:

In the end only some of those who were interested in the seals could go with the Professor and me — Gwen Halley³, his brightest research student, Dolly⁴ [Matthews’s wife], Jean⁵ (Matthews’s daughter) and Allen Goffin⁶…Allen was the Professor’s head laboratory technician, section cutter, photomicrographer, mechanic and general standby; he had been in the Commandos during the war and was the strong man of the party— he could turn his hand to anything from cooking a splendid meal or humping a hundredweight of gear up an almost vertical cliff, to fixing and preserving the most delicate histological material.

They also had considerable help from Peter Rowe, the son of the local farmer.

The whole study was dubbed Operation LACTRAM—the investigation of LACTation in the Grey Seal at RAMsey. However, because the mother seal was named ‘Mrs Mopp’ after the charwoman character in the radio programme ITMA, the whole affair is referred to as the Mrs Mopp Expedition. Her pup was named ‘Willie’.

The book has photographs of the Mrs Mopp expedition. They were extracted from a ciné film taken I suspect by Allen Goffin who amongst the many attributes listed by Matthews was a good man at ciné and still photography. I have been unable to find what happened to the film. It was shown at a meeting of the Physiological Society in November 1950, only around a month after the party left Ramsey, but it appears not to be held by the BFI (where another of Goffin’s films is archived). Does anybody know if it has survived?

Mrs Mopp and Willie were captured 3 days after parturition and kept in a large cage which could be weighed. When they were released 15 days later the mother went to sea and the party departed. Peter Rowe then noted that the mother returned to feed the pup regularly for another 3 days and then left him to his own devices.

The book ends with what happened a year later. Amo and Matthews were again on Ramsey. They had packed their equipment in October 1951 and were on the beach when Matthews decided to demonstrate his ability to ‘call’ out the cows from the sea. He succeeded in doing so but Amo sneezed and they retreated. However, they and the other scientists with them noticed that one of the cows hadn’t seemed bothered by human scent. Then Matthews saw the distinctive scars on her back. It was Mrs Mopp.

That ending though was not Amo’s most memorable story of their work on Ramsey. Amo realised that to get milk samples, a breast pump of the type used by human mothers was needed. As he said, a medical graduate and possessor of that ancient degree, Bachelor of the Art of Obstetrics (BAO) which Dublin awarded alongside its degrees in medicine and surgery, should have anticipated such a requirement. The comings and goings of the scientists visiting Ramsey were the talk of the small town on the mainland from which they obtained supplies. There were—shock horror—women with the men and one of those men, Amo, was black—and in 1950, Amo was the only black man they had ever seen. What was going on? Tongues were wagging when one of the party went ashore asking where he could buy a breast pump. Mission accomplished, the purchaser heard the gossip as he passed by: ‘Looking for a breast pump (the word ‘breast’ would have been whispered) he was. One of them must have had a baby’.

A final swig of tea and a long puff of the cigar, by now diminished in length, and Amo was across the corridor and back in his tiny office.