Male elephant seals are not known for their paternal instincts. While these giant animals spread out on the beach during the breeding season, they focus on mating with females and fighting other males. As their two-ton mass hurtles around the colony in pursuit of these goals, they “run over their young” without hesitation, crushing even their own offspring, says Daniel Costa, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Which makes the events of January 27, 2022 even more surprising. Sarah Allen and Matthew Lau, wildlife biologists with the National Park Service, were surveying northern elephant seal populations at Point Reyes National Seashore, about 30 miles northwest of San Francisco. As they walked past a colony relaxing on the beach, they noticed a young pup resting with an adult female near the water.
“It was a warm day,” Dr. Allen recalls, so she thought the two were enjoying relaxing on the wet sand.
When Dr. Allen and Mr. Lau passed the colony again on their way back, the situation changed. The high tide had pulled the pup out to sea, and he was too young to swim, struggling to stay afloat. The female was still on the beach, answering the pup's plaintive cries with calls of her own, attracting the attention of a nearby male.
“We thought he would try to mate with her,” Dr. Allen said.
Instead, he snorted the female and then “charged into the waves,” she said. When he reached the pup, he used his body to gently push him to shore — possibly saving his life.
Dr. Allen has observed elephant seals for over 40 years and has never seen anything like this before. “I called a bunch of colleagues and asked them if they had ever seen anything like this, and no one had,” she said. “It's completely out of the ordinary,” Dr. Costa agreed.
Dr. Allen and her colleagues They posted their note In January in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Dr Costa said the article could encourage other seal scientists to research similar behaviours.
The northern elephant seals rapidly during the breeding season (from approximately December to March), so males usually try to save their energy for mating and fending off rivals. By dashing toward shore like David Hasselhoff in “Baywatch,” this seal rescuer was not only abandoning his harem of females, but also expending valuable energy.
This prompted Dr. Allen to explain what she saw as a possibility An act of altruismWhen one organism sacrifices some of its own well-being to help another.
“He was very firm and direct in getting there and very quickly,” she said. “Then he came back, and he was very nice.”
While the male clearly intended to push the pup onto shore, it is impossible to fully understand his intentions in doing so. Since this is the first time anyone has seen something like this from an elephant seal, Dr. Costa believes it was a rare one-time behavior.
Altruism in the animal kingdom is most common among close relatives, and because northern elephant seals were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century and then rebounded, many of them are more closely related than they would otherwise be. Dr. Allen suspects that the male seal and the boy he saved are related in some way, but without genetic data, she can't say for sure.
Elephant seals live a life of extremes. When they're not at the beach fasting, fighting, and breeding, they… Spending months at sea Continuously diving in search of food, sometimes up to a mile deep. “Elephant seals are complex,” Dr. Allen said. “We only see a small part of their lives.” She believes it's time we start looking at male elephant seals in a new light.
Dr. Costa believed that elephant seals in general lacked… The mental abilities of their sea lion cousins. But the dramatic rescue on the beach in Point Reyes showed him there may be more than meets the eye.
“Maybe more is going on there than I thought,” he said with a laugh.
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