In my previous roles working with seals, the weather rarely dictated whether work happened — only how uncomfortable it might be. I’ve pressure-washed outdoor seal enclosures in rescue centers in driving rain, worked through snowstorms at Bird Island with the British Antarctic Survey, and endured intense heat on the Galápagos sea lion project. The work simply carried on. There were moments when sanity was questionable. Times when it took an hour just to defrost fingers, or when you were so soaked through that it felt pointless trying to dry out. Every seal team also had a bit of a reputation for being hard on equipment — waterproof casings inevitably failed, salt spray found its way into everything, and we were forever asking for help fixing kit that had once again been pushed to its limits by the marine environment. There’s a saying that pets often reflect their owners, and I’ve long thought there might be something similar going on with researchers and their study species. W...