Elephant Seals
These are young male Northern Elephant Seals practicing a bit of sparring. This will become very important as they grow up because dominant males can impregnate up to fifty females whereas the weaklings are likely to be involuntary celibates. A full-grown male typically weighs 3000-5000 lbs and can be up to 5m long. Females are much smaller, weighing only about a third of a male. They spend most of their time at sea, only coming to land to breed. I photographed these at San Simeon in California which had no breeding Elephant Seals until 1990, but has since built up to more than a thousand. I loved the smiling assassin in the background. They were hunted almost to extinction by the end of the nineteenth century and the population was thought to be extinct by 1884. But eight individuals were found in 1892 on Guadalupe Island. Since the early twentieth century they were given protection in both Mexico and USA and numbers have now risen to more than 100,000.
Elephant Seals
These are young male Northern Elephant Seals practicing a bit of sparring. This will become very important as they grow up because dominant males can impregnate up to fifty females whereas the weaklings are likely to be involuntary celibates. A full-grown male typically weighs 3000-5000 lbs and can be up to 5m long. Females are much smaller, weighing only about a third of a male. They spend most of their time at sea, only coming to land to breed. I photographed these at San Simeon in California which had no breeding Elephant Seals until 1990, but has since built up to more than a thousand. I loved the smiling assassin in the background. They were hunted almost to extinction by the end of the nineteenth century and the population was thought to be extinct by 1884. But eight individuals were found in 1892 on Guadalupe Island. Since the early twentieth century they were given protection in both Mexico and USA and numbers have now risen to more than 100,000.