Juan Fernández fur seals are so poorly understood that they were considered extinct for nearly a century before a remnant population which had managed to evade generations of hunters was rediscovered in the 1960s.
Their mysterious nature owes a lot to their seclusion on an archipelago of the same name 600km off the Chilean coast. These remote islands are situated in a protected national park – the last place you might expect to find animals exposed to high levels of pollution. But samples I collected and analysed with colleagues tell us something different.
