Elephant Seal
Mirounga leonina & M. angustirostris
The largest carnivore on land or sea — with a nose it uses as a loudspeaker.
A male southern elephant seal can weigh four tonnes, more than a pickup truck, making it the biggest carnivoran alive. It spends most of the year alone at sea, diving deeper than almost any other mammal, and comes ashore mainly to shout at other males.
On the conservation status
Northern elephant seals were hunted down to perhaps 20–100 animals in the 1890s. Every one of the 200,000+ alive today descends from that tiny group.
- Length
- Males up to 6 m (20 ft)
- Weight
- Males up to 4,000 kg
- Lifespan
- 20–22 years
- Diet
- Squid, rays, fish, small sharks
- Dive depth
- Regularly 1,000 m+
- Longest dive
- About 2 hours
The good stuff.
The nose is an instrument
Mature males grow an inflatable proboscis — that's the elephant part. They fill it with air and use it to amplify a roar that sounds like a motorbike being started inside a drum.
They out-dive nearly everything
Elephant seals routinely dive 400 to 1,000 metres and have been recorded past 2,000. They spend around 80–90% of their life underwater, and only about two minutes at the surface between dives.
Eight months without touching land
They cross entire oceans alone, feeding constantly, and only come ashore twice a year — once to breed, once to moult.
They shed in sheets
It's called a catastrophic moult. Instead of losing hairs gradually, they peel off skin and fur in big ragged patches over about a month, and they look absolutely dreadful doing it.
Beachmasters run the beach
The biggest bulls fight until one wins a stretch of beach and the dozens of females on it. Winners father almost every pup; most males never breed at all.
Mothers fast the whole time
A nursing mother doesn't eat for about a month, losing a third of her body weight while her pup triples its own on milk that's up to 55% fat.
Wait, really?
- ✦
They carry scientific instruments: tagged elephant seals have collected huge amounts of the ocean temperature data we have from under Antarctic ice.
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Their blood holds so much oxygen that they can shut down blood flow to most of the body while diving.
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A bull's chest shield — thick, scarred, wrinkled skin — is armour built for fighting.
What it sounds like
Deep, throbbing, mechanical roars you can hear a kilometre down the beach.
Where you might see one
Central California beaches from December to March, plus South Georgia, the Falklands and Macquarie Island.
The trouble
- Entanglement in marine debris
- Disturbance at breeding beaches
- Prey shifts from a changing ocean
- Very low genetic diversity in the northern species
One real thing
At places like Año Nuevo and Piedras Blancas in California, stay behind the fences and on the boardwalks. Those beaches are nurseries.
More ways to help