Elephants at Sea?

Not long ago, I was playing with the kids in the waves at a beach when an animal’s head popped up in the water. Seeing seals is fairly common along this coastline, but most are either sea lions or harbor seals. This time, I was surprised to see a gigantic nose on this particular beast. It looked like an elephant was swimming next to me.

I’ve seen real elephants on trips to foreign countries. I’ve even ridden a couple of them. I’ve seen elephants at zoos and animal sanctuaries. I’ve even seen elephants skydiving. But I hadn’t expected to encounter one in the cold waters of the north Pacific Ocean.

No, that skydiving video is not real; it’s a clever animation. And of course, it wasn’t an elephant I saw off a North American beach, but a bull male elephant seal with a humongous nose.

Northern Elephant Seals

If you’ve never seen an elephant seal, you might wonder why these pinnipeds ended up with such a strange name. But the instant you see a bull male, it all makes sense. Elephant seals have big, gray bodies and the males also feature a large, distinctive, and bulbous nose. There are northern and southern varieties; in my region we get the northerners.

Top image and this one are both from Wikimedia.com under a Creative Commons license. Top image by Amit Patel and this one by Jerry Kirkhart.

Northern elephant seals can be seen throughout much of the North Pacific Ocean, especially off the coast of North America. But females and males alike return to a common base: one of the breeding colonies on the continent’s west coast. Ano Nuevo and San Simeon, both on California’s central coast, have the two largest breeding colonies for elephant seals.

Deep Divers

Elephant seals (northern and southern) dive much more deeply than other seals. In fact, aside from the cetacean (whale) family, elephant seals can go more deeply than any other mammal. Their average dive depth is around 2,000 feet (around 600 meters). So an average elephant seal dive doubles what a human being could achieve with the most extreme freedive. But that’s not even the elephant seal maximum; they can go as low as around 5500 feet or 1678 meters, holding their breath for as long as two hours. The human breathing record is just over 22 minutes, while 10 minutes might be more typical for freedivers.

The following is a chart created from an elephant seal with a GPS collar; each of these small curves represents one of her dives and the red portions show when her jaws were moving (probably eating). You can see that most of her food comes on deeper dives.

From elephantseal.org.

These seals hang around the surface for 3-5 minutes at a time, breathing and resting before their next dive. If you are fortunate enough to see one of these creatures in the water, and then they duck back down, keep watching. Mostly likely, you will see their heads again a few times before they aim for the deep. But unlike most seals and sea lions, which largely feed in relatively shallow waters, these ones head further out to make their big dives, so it’s not as common that you see their heads pop up near the coast.

Here is a chart created from tagging and tracking a group of Northern Elephant Seals, so you can see that they "commute" further north west in the Pacific, some reaching far up in Alaska or far west to the International Date Line, and then they return to the central coast for mating/breeding/pupping/etc. This particular group returns to the same spot each year, but a larger sampling of seals from different colonies will show them returning to those places as well.

Northern Elephant Seal migration routes from Ano Nuevo. Source: UCSC.

The diet of elephant seals includes squid, octopus, sharks (though not the huge ones!), rays, salmon, and other fish. All that food packs on the pounds for these seals; like other marine mammals, they wear a thick layer of insulating fat called blubber. Adult females can reach 9-10 feet (2.7-3 meters) while adult males can exceed that with lengths of 12-18 feet (3.7-5.5 meters). The largest can tip the scales at 4400-6000 pounds (2000-2722 kilograms). On land, they look fat and clumsy, but at sea, they are sleek torpedoes moving through the water.

Elephant seals on the coastline at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California. Public domain.

Their Population and Cycle

From Alaska to Mexico, northern elephant seals were hunted almost to extinction. The main attraction was not their coat, but their blubber, a rich source of oil that was highly prized in the 19th Century. By 1910, fewer than 1,000 elephant seals remained in these waters. Mexico was the first country in the region to address the problem by imposing a ban on hunting these animals. The United States and others followed.

Today, there are estimated to be 150,000 Northern elephants seals. Around the 1970s, they began to return or establish breeding colonies along the West Coast. The two largest are at Ano Nuevo and Piedras Blancas (a few miles north of San Simeon) in California. If you visit either of these places, you can see some elephant seals year-round. But if you go between November and February, you will see the seals preparing for their mating season. This is the most entertaining time because the large males fight with one another over the female seals who lounge on the rocks and sandy strips of beach. The fights are quite loud and can get bloody.

Here is a short National Geographic video showing the males fighting.

From December to March, females arrive to give birth to young seal pups and they are fun to see also. Pups are about 60 pounds at birth and they grow quickly. Within a few weeks after giving birth, females mate again. Then they leave their growing pups, usually by March or April, and go back to the ocean until the cycle repeats. During other months, you will see some seals at the rookery. Seals stay on land during molting (as their coats change); juveniles and elderly seals also spend more time there over the summer.

As you can see, the females and pups do not have the huge noses of the adult males. They look much like other seals. Creative Commons via Wikipedia.com by Brocken Inaglory.

Do real elephants swim in the ocean?

Of course, it’s not impossible to see a real elephant swimming in the ocean. In Sri Lanka in 2017, after a flood, two Navy ships found an elephant swimming 10 miles (16 kilometers) off the coast. Here is a video of their rescue. There’s also a video of an elephant who likes to swim in the ocean with its human friends.

Next time I’m out in the waves, I’ll start looking for snorkel and periscope tops; they might just be the tip of an elephant’s trunk!

Sea rescue of an elephant: