Our Observation of the Week is this pair of dueling Southern Elephant Seals, seen in the French Southern Territories by @admss!
A bird enthusiast, Adrien Mauss visited the Kerguelen Islands, in the far southern Indian Ocean, in 2013. “I was lucky to spend some months [there],” Adrien tells me, and he is currently iNat’s top observer for the French Southern Territories with 89 verifiable observations.
Elephant seals spend a majority of the year at sea hunting squid, fish, and other prey (diving to depths of over 2,000 meters!), but mate and pup on land. Males generally return before females do, and “they begin to fight for the control of a ‘harem’ of females, containing sometimes more than 20 of them,” explains Adrien.
This picture shows a typical fight. They face each other and attack with their sharp teeth, mostly around the neck. The fight finishes when one of them abdicates and runs away from the group of females. During that season, due the fights most of the males are wounded, but rarely badly. They all wear a lot of scars around the neck, and some damage to the nose [note: photo may be disturbing].
Females give birth on land and nurse their pups for just over three weeks, not eating for this entire time. The pups grow from about 40 kg (88 lbs) and triple that weight before weaning. Adrien tells me “except for their fights, elephant seals have a really peaceful life on the ground, where they have no predators and spend most of the time sleeping, snoring and dreaming.”
“As far as I'm concerned, I'm just a nature enthusiast,” says Adrien (above, watching seabirds on the Kerguelen coast). “I've not been using INat for a long time, unlike other databases.
But I like the way it works here, helping newbies to identify flora or fauna, and everybody is a beginner for some place of the world and/or for some genus. I like the discussions around ID and the “democratic” approach of identification with all the good and the bad that can bring...I've been birding in France and Europe for 20 years and I have a good knowledge of European birds, not much about everything else so I benefit from the skills of others here!
- by Tony Iwane. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
- Here’s a classic clip of David Attenborough getting too close to a male Southern Elephant Seal.
- By the end of its nursing period, a female elephant seal’s milk is about 50% fat!
