Sea lion paparazzi to keep tabs on whales .  LONDON 1996-08-22  U.S. marine biologists have trained a pair of sea lions to tag and photograph elusive whales as they cruise through the Pacific depths , [START_ENT] New Scientist [END_ENT] magazine reported on Thursday .  James Harvey and Jennifer Hurley of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California say their sea lions , natural companions of many species of whale , can go where no man or woman has ever gone before .  " Any diver knows that when a whale gets going you ca n't keep up , " Harvey told the magazine . "  That is why we know only about five percent of what whales do . "  The sea lions -- 17-year-old Beaver and nine-year-old Sake -- have undergone six years of training for their mission .  Beaver once worked for the U.S. Navy and Sake is an amusement park veteran .  Harvey said they could accurately tag whales with a radio transmitter , and could also swim all the way around one of the giant mammals , filming it with a video camera .  Their first assignment , later this year , will be documenting humpback whale migration off Monterey , California .  The article did not spell out exactly how the sea lions manage to tag the whales but said in training they were taught to stick a radio transmitter on to a plastic model of a whale using suction cups .
New Scientist