Elephant Seals

I sort of had a vision of hiking Año Nuevo State Park on New Year’s Day since I moved here and saw a green area on Google Maps with that name. Mostly because I’m a big dork. I later learned that the shore of Año Nuevo is the breeding ground of a large colony of northern elephant seals and that during breeding season, you can only access a large part of the park on docent-led hikes that sell out quickly. Of course I didn’t buy a ticket in time and I do not regret that AT ALL, because as you may know I SAW A BOBCAT on New Year’s Day and NOTHING is better than that. But I did several weeks ago secure a ticket for an elephant seal hike on the second Saturday of the year.

I wasn’t expecting elephant seals to be very photogenic, and really, they aren’t. They’re no bobcats, let’s just say that. But they are unique and we sure as heck didn’t have anything like them in Northern Virginia. I didn’t realize until the hike, though, how very interesting their natural history and life cycle are. For one thing, THEY ARE FREAKING HUGE. The hike started with a display of several skull specimens, including a grizzly bear, a female elephant seal, and a male elephant seal. The male elephant seal’s skull was three times bigger than the grizzly’s. Male elephant seals weigh about 5,000 pounds. That’s 2 1/2 TONS, or more than both my cars combined. Basically they show up at Año Nuevo (or other rookery) in the winter and once they come ashore to breed, they don’t get in the water again until it’s time for spring migration, which means they don’t eat for three months or more. All they do is lie around, sleeping, with the females giving birth and suckling, and the males battling for dominance, and both species copulating, which by the way doesn’t sound like a good time for the females, who top out at just 1,400 pounds. In fact, elephant seals display one of the biggest examples of sexual dimorphism, with males and females being very different.

So the females come ashore in the winter to give birth to the pups they’ve been carrying all year. The pups are weaned after about 28 days and then are left to their own devices: the moms don’t teach them to swim or anything. In fact, pups are sometimes killed when crushed by males carelessly mating with the females. Once impregnated, the females leave on their migration route, which differs from the males in that it is more southerly. Then the pups have to teach themselves to swim, and THEN they have to figure out how migrate. SOMEHOW, and we don’t know how, they figure out how to follow the same migration route as the rest of the species, without being shown. Although their routes are different, males and females migrate 7,000 miles each every year. It’s crazy. While migrating, for about 9 months a year, they don’t ever land anywhere. They’re just in the water the whole time. They sleep by flipping over onto their backs and slowly sinking through the water. When they hit the bottom, it wakes them up and they bounce back up to the surface and inhale enough air to maintain themselves through another sleep cycle.

It’s just WEIRD, right?

This is one of the first elephant seals we saw on our hike. Can you find him? You probably can’t in this tiny picture. He’s by the darker area of the boardwalk that juts out to the left.