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[shienok]

Marine skeleton-makers: Beautiful work of sea-fleas.-The service which swarms of Amphidodons (Sic! - АШ) crustaceans rendered me in cleaning the bones of birds, fish, and even seals, cannot be too highly eulogized. Only in that small bight, however, known as the "Cove", near the village of St. Paul, could I get the work done; because at no other spot on the Pribylov islands was the sea-water quiet enough. By taking common hard-bread boxes, which the company's agent gave me from the store, and substituting a slatted cover, I would, by rock-ballasting, sink this with fifteen or twenty bird carcasses in the water here at low tide. When a single flow and ebb had taken place, I had the box taken promptly out, never failing to find every skeleton perfectly polished, yet entirely articulated; the most delicate bones in a fish's head or fins were intact. The strong food which the blubber of the seal carcasses afford acts so as to gorge and stupefy these little ghouls of the ocean, for I did not succeed well at all with such attempts. The bones of Callorhinus would have to lay submerged in the cove for weeks, sometimes, ere they were eaten free of flesh, fat, etc.; then, when taken out, they would be sadly discolored by the salt water, turned black and dingy in streaks and sections.

Henry Wood Elliott. "Seal islands of Alaska", 1882.