For the past four years, Ms Whyte has been part of Department of Conservation-led (Doc) team which has travelled to the remote, uninhabited islands to the south of mainland New Zealand to work with the large sea lion population during the breeding season.
As the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital Trust manager and a trustee of the New Zealand Sea Lion Trust, working to help preserve sea lion colonies is close to her heart.
"The work is hard and the conditions are basic, but I just love it and feel so lucky to be part of the team," she said.
Enderby Island is in the Auckland Islands archipelago, part of New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands group, which also includes the Antipodes, Bounty, Campbell, and Snares islands.
Collectively designated a Unesco World Heritage Site, the islands are home to colonies of sea lions and fur seals, and 120 species of seabirds, including Southern Royal Albatross, hoiho/yellow-eyed penguins, Snares crested penguins, titi/sooty shearwaters, mollymawks, shags, gulls, skua, and terns.
The team travelled to Enderby Island in late November, a challenging 40-plus hour trip in rough seas on the Dunedin-based motorised expedition yacht Evohe — made more difficult for Ms Whyte by a tendency towards motion sickness.
"It was a very tough trip for me on the boat, I felt very unwell for the whole journey," Ms Whyte said.
"But, this is how much I love sea lions — I am willing to put up with a lot of discomfort and sickness to be able to work with them."
Doc’s work with sea lions in the Subantarctic Islands has been ongoing for the past 30 years, funded through the Conservation Services Programme — a fisheries levy which funds research projects and goes towards Doc’s budget.
After a trial in 2017 showed treating pups in their first week of life led to improvements in overall health and earlier breeding among females, this season’s Doc team spent longer than usual at Enderby Island — from late November to late January — to treat female pups for hookworm.
"Treating the hookworm in the female pups when they are a week old gives them a better start to life and improves their chances of breeding — so we needed to be on-hand to treat all of the female pups in the colony," Ms Whyte said.
With roughly 300 pups born, both male and female, it was a big job.
"This season the treatment, tagging and chipping meant that there was a lot more pup handling — it was pretty full on.
"For me, as a sea lion person, it was great to know that we were taking practical steps to help with a significant threat facing the sea lion population.
"And if it leads to more breeding females in the medium to long-term then that will be a great outcome for the population in the Subantarctic Islands, which is unfortunately dropping."
Because the team arrived at Enderby Island earlier than usual and got busy working with the pups straight away, by the time they got to the stage of tagging the pups, they were "a well oiled machine", Ms Whyte said.
"When you’re catching and tagging the pups, the aim is to be as quick as possible and, given we were catching them a second time, they were more wary," she said.
"The pups are so curious as well, that it can make things a little bit tricky — they can congregate around you and they will chew on anything.
"They are very funny, but they also tend to hold things up a bit when you are trying to work."
They also undertook a nest survey of the Southern Royal Albatross population, sweeping the island and counting the nests and eggs on behalf of Doc’s seabird team.
Satellite tags were also deployed by a veterinarian team member on five albatross to track their foraging activities and see if they intersected with the larger Campbell Island population.
Scrapings were done on some birds to test for avian influenza for MPI.
The team also headed across to Dundas Island and spent time at Figure of Eight Island, doing sea lion work on both islands.
"Figure of Eight is a lovely island, tiny and covered in matai forest, with a small colony of sea lions living in the bush — getting to visit there was a real privilege," Ms Whyte said.
On their way home in late January, which was a much smoother trip, the team stopped in at Snares Island to pick up a seabird research team.
"We arrived at 6.30am and got to watch from the water as thousands of titi left their nests, then albatross and mollymawks.
"We also got to see thousands of Snares Crested penguins — there are 36,000 breeding pairs on the island — head out to fish.
"It was an incredible sight to see."
