‘No one has heard of this’: Bay Area elephant seal does something never seen before

March 3, 2024 (Posted by) Don Pelton

[Excerpt from article in SFGATE March 2, 2024]

By Eric Brooks

The male elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore are large and in charge.

While they visit Point Reyes beaches at various times throughout the year, the real action happens during mating and pupping season in the winter.

It’s then that these bull elephant seals — weighing as much as 5,500 pounds — are laser-focused on mating with 1,200-pound females and fighting off other dominant males to defend ownership of their personal mating colony, also known as a harem. They’re so motivated by those goals that they’ve been known to ignore and trample young 60-pound seal pups in the process.

So it was a surprise last month when a new paper published in Marine Mammal Science documented an apparent act of bull elephant altruism towards a pup. Even the two Point Reyes wildlife biologists who witnessed the display, which took place at Drake’s Beach on Jan. 27, 2022, were stunned.

“We both knew how very unusual it was,” said Matt Lau, a biological science technician at Point Reyes National Seashore. “Sarah [Allen] noted how rare it was and thought we should publish this and get it out to the academic arena so everyone knows about it.”

That day in January began as usual, with Allen and Lau out on Drakes Beach, conducting a count of males, females, and pups. As they passed a small harem, they noted that a female and her roughly 2-week-old pup were about 30 to 50 feet from the group and close to the water, likely attempting to cool off.

When they swung back around, the pup’s situation had worsened.

“We observed the same cow much closer to the water, but we also saw the pup out in the surf,” Lau said. “It’s pretty shallow surf on Drakes Beach, but the pups can’t swim at all until they are weaned. They’re pretty weak swimmers. You could see [the pup] struggling quite a bit. Its head was popping up and down.”

The waves, estimated at 3 to 6 feet that day, continued to pull the pup out to sea.

As the drowning pup cried for help and the female let out an “urgent” motherly shout, a nearby bull elephant seal engaged.

“We thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to try and mate with her,’” Allen told the New York Times.

But that’s not what happened.

The male — identified in the paper as the harem’s alpha — “approached the calling female, briefly touching his nose to her left flank,” the paper describes. The female then rebuffed him and continued calling toward her pup, and the male “instantly turned and charged across wet sand and into the surf, swimming swiftly out to the struggling pup.”