The standard issue tool for the oceanographer at sea is the Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth instrument (or CTD).

This work is expensive, requiring a properly outfitted ship and crew. But what if you could get a decidedly low-tech piece of equipment to do most of the work for you?

Researchers in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica (and elsewhere) have developed a sealCTD—a (small) CTD instrument strapped to a seal, which then gathers data that is otherwise quite hard to come by.

As user Boskone eloquently noted in the article comments, the seals must be saying to themselves some variant of: “Fuckin’ two-legged things. Net our fish, club us to death, and now they’re gluing shit to my head. We really gotta get our space program off the ground.”

Via Ars Technica.