Año Nuevo Elephant Seals
by David Bolling
Odyssey Magazine - September, 2005
Let me be perfectly honest. This is a story about voracious sex, binge eating, male supremacy, polygamy, child abandonment, and radical obesity. It makes Animal House look like a garden party. It's not pretty.
So before you read any further, you may want to send the kids out of the room, pull the blinds and lock the doors. The scene I'm going to describe would be illegal, or at least medically discouraged, in many parts of America, but still it takes place every year, in plain view, on a public beach, with thousands of participants, in - where else? - California.
Worse yet, not only can you watch - there are guided tours. At Año Nuevo, just up Highway One from Santa Cruz. Even the kids can go.
There are at least two ways of looking at this sordid spectacle. On the one hand, if you're a man, maybe you'll relate. That's because the principal players in this outdoor orgy are bellowing, chest-beating, macho males who fight each other for control of large harems and then have a great deal of noisy sex.
On the other hand, if you're a woman, the promiscuous behavior and the lack of gender equality may offend you. Especially since these amorous males are about as subtle as a D9 Caterpillar tractor and almost as heavy. There's no wine and roses at this party and the 3-to-1 size differential between males and females makes romance painful if not actually dangerous.
Of course, we're not talking about humans - no male human would behave this way, would he? We're talking about elephant seals, the ne plus ultra of pinniped evolution, the biggest, fattest, marine mammals to ever take over a beach. Which leads us to the outrageously obese part of the story.
Now, a California sea lion is a hefty beast. Males can reach a thousand pounds. But that's chump change. A Steller sea lion can weigh more than a ton. Impressive, but still small potatoes. A full-grown male walrus can top 3000 pounds. That's some serious blubber, but it's nowhere near the elephant seal, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the non-whale, marine mammal world. Try 16 feet and 5000 pounds. That's a Chevy Suburban with seating for nine, air conditioning, and the upgraded velour upholstery.
Gender inequality usually begins with size and elephant seals are an extreme example of sexual dimorphism, in which natural selection encourages males to bulk up and be manly, the better to defend harems, drive off competitors and enrich the gene pool. The females, therefore, are petite by comparison, running a relatively svelte 900-2000 pounds. Their primary job, which they do as briefly and efficiently as possible, is to birth and nurse their young.
The pregnant females all deliver their young within a week of arrival, a feat of synchronized childbirth made possible by the fact the fertilized egg doesn't implant to the mother's uterus wall for up to four months, thus sparing the pups a sea birth they couldn't survive. The newborn pups weigh about 75 pounds, but by the time they're weaned a month later they will have reached 250 to 350 pounds.
That extraordinary weight gain comes thanks to the extravagant richness of the mother's milk, which is 55 percent fat and has the consistency of pudding. Occasionally a "weaner" will find a lactating cow who's lost her pup and begin suckling again, putting on even more weight and becoming what is called (I'm serious about this, but don't try to say it really fast) a "double-mother-sucker super-weaner."
Unlike other pinnipeds (the sub-order of four-flippered, amphibious carnivores), elephant seal moms pull the plug at about 28 days and kiss the kids goodby. Suddenly, and without warning, the weaners are on their own. They have to learn how to swim, eat, navigate and survive, by themselves. Anywhere else, somebody would call child protective services, but this is Año Nuevo, a state wildlife reserve where different rules apply.
The odds of weaners surviving their first year in the big wide ocean aren't great; only about half will return for their first birthday. The learning curve is pretty steep and, since they travel solo, there's no one around to give lessons. Stacking the odds against them is the predatory presence of great white sharks which have added Año Nuevo to their banquet circuit. The weaners who make it will return twice each year to the beach of their birth to molt and, if they're lucky, eventually mate. What takes place on that beach each winter is something beyond even your wildest imagination.
It has to be the ultimate party scene in all of nature. Picture, if you can, up to 5500 raucous, writhing, quarrelling, fighting, bleeding, birthing, nursing and shamelessly mating mounds of barely ambulatory blubber. You can hear and smell them almost a mile away, and up close the noise and odor are overwhelming. The party stretches across a sizeable swath of the 300-acre dune field that covers most of Año Nuevo Point, but party central is often a stretch of beach just east of the Point, at the base of a high sloping dune. There the seals are sometimes arranged like cord wood, layered up against each other in a riot of motion and discordant sound. I'm not aware of a glossary that catalogs the vocabulary of elephant seals, but their sounds include grunts, squeals, bleats, bellows, groans, roars, grumbles, croaks, screams, barks, snorts, belches, cackles, moos, and what, to my untrained ear, is an almost perfect imitation of a two-ton bullfrog.
That basso profundo croak is produced by the adult males who bellow through the pendulous noses that give them their name. The schnoz on an alpha male can grow two feet long and, besides looking bizarre and providing an acoustic instrument, is a secondary sex characteristic that by its very size helps establish male superiority without the need to fight. Elephant seals are clumsy and inelegant on land and, unlike sea lions, their flippers aren't very useful for terrestrial locomotion. So they move forward like fat slugs, squirming and lunging over the sand. Watching two alpha bulls charge each other chest-to-chest is both riveting and often hilarious. Their chests are covered with an armor-like padding of thick, "cornified" skin, so when they do fight they're seldom seriously hurt, although their long, canine teeth are capable of drawing blood.
For male elephant seals, physical supremacy leads to sex, the jackpot of their genetic programming. Over a period of three months, the alpha bulls will stake out and defend a territory, gather a harem of up to 100 cows, drive off interlopers, wannabes and the occasional love-struck sub-adult male, and then mate tirelessly as much as eight to ten times a day. It has been estimated that only about one percent of male elephant seals get to have sex. The rest just hang around waiting. Imagine the frustration.
For lucky males with access to the action, nothing seems to get in their way, not even the occasional hapless weaner crushed by an unseeing suitor. I've stood with a three-person film crew 20 feet from a mating bull, our Betacam stuffed in his face as he climbed aboard a cow, and he simply ignored us.
To human observers, it isn't sexual prowess that makes the elephant seals so impressive, it's their incredible ability to fast and dive. During their three month breeding binge the males don't eat or drink anything. They survive entirely on stored blubber, that 50 percent of their bodies composed of fat. So while obesity is a health-care crisis for humans, in elephant seals it's a sign of biological success. Being fat improves survival.
The leading research on elephant seals has been done by a team of marine scientists at the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz. Burney Le Boeuf, associate vice chancellor for research, has devoted 30 years to elephant seal study and he says the long fast is possible because when males arrive for mating, "they come with a refrigerator full of stores." In other words, they really bulk up before they breed. Then, after as much as 100 days on the beach, they spend another 45 days or so without food, traveling back to their feeding grounds around Alaska. When they get there they binge, "probably around the clock, for 30 days," says Le Boeuf.
And that's not the only thing extreme about their feeding behavior. Their diving almost defies belief.
Elephant seals are bottom feeders; they eat rays, skates, squid and small sharks in very deep, mostly pitch-black water. Some of the prey are bioluminescent - they glow - and the seals have enormous and very sensitive eyes. To catch that prey, they go deeper than any other marine mammal except (perhaps) the sperm whale, deeper in fact than the deepest diving nuclear submarine which naval experts believe may be able to safely reach 2500 to 3000 feet (it's classified). An elephant seal has been measured at more than 5000 feet, and 2000 foot dives are routine. The average dive takes 20 or 30 minutes and they can stay underwater up to an hour and a half. How they do it has been part of the focus of UCSC researchers, who have outfitted the seals with tracking and recording devices, and even video cameras.
Among their findings: Elephant seals carry 20 percent more blood oxygen than humans and use it much more efficiently. Dan Costa, another UCSC researcher, says their oxygen management suggests "they have an internal SCUBA tank…it's a phenomenal animal." And when they dive, they completely deflate their lungs and glide down, saving energy, while restricting blood flow to their extremities and reducing their heart rate to four beats per minute.
It's equally amazing that northern elephant seals even exist. By the end of the Nineteenth Century they had been hunted for their oil almost to extinction. In 1892 there was one colony left, on an island off Baja numbering between 20 and 100 survivors. But then Mexico gave them protected status in 1922 and the U.S. followed suit a few years later. Today, after decades of exponential growth, the population has rebounded to over 200,000.
The first wave of this seal revival hit Año Nuevo in 1955 and now nearly 2000 pups are born there each year. The colony has probably reached carrying capacity and the overflow has begun to colonize other parts of the California coast, including the Pt. Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco, and the Farallon Islands 26 miles offshore. Beginning in 1990 an enormous colony has developed on the central California coast at Peidras Blancas, seven miles north of San Simeon. That colony now hosts up to 14,000 seals, with 3500 pups born in 2005.
If you want to join the party, peak viewing season is January and February, although the seals begin returning in late December and some of them linger into March. They come back in the summer to shed their fur and outer skin in what is called a "catastrophic molt," then depart until it's time to birth and breed.
The winter window allows both scientists and civilian voyeurs to witness the birthing and mating spectacle at a distance of only 25 feet. Outside African game parks, I don't know another place in the world where you can see a wild animal congregation so big, so loud, so real, and so close.
Año Nuevo is a good day trip and if you want to stretch elephant seals into a winter weekend, I'd suggest you sandwich it into a stay in Santa Cruz, a classic California beach town 25 miles down the coast. There is much to see and do there that doesn't involve mating marine mammals, including the Santa Cruz boardwalk with its Giant Dipper, California's only full-sized beachfront roller coaster, and the new 125 foot-high Double Shot, a ride that blasts you straight up, high above the beach, and then drops you straight down without your stomach. Downtown Santa Cruz is also worth a visit.
Now fully recovered from the 1989 earthquake, it has great shopping and some memorable restaurants. Another good stop is the Seymour Marine Discover Center, at UCSC's Long Marine Laboratory. The Seymour Center, a collection of public exhibits in the heart of an operational marine lab, offers tours and learning programs organized around the actual research being conducted on site. And while you're there, check out the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum overlooking Steamer Lane, one of the greatest point breaks in all of California and a prime place to see experts shred the waves. Between Santa Cruz and elephant seals it will be a weekend to remember.
David Bolling is a journalist, author and filmmaker who can hold his breath underwater for maybe a minute and has never been deeper than 100 feet.