That's a big rock.... wait.... that's a huge elephant seal!

Throughout the year we get the occasional elephant seal (or smell-a-phant as they are known here) lazing on the beaches. They seem to spend most of their time sleeping, and lying in piles of rotten kelp, which gives them a particularly pungent aroma. Most of the individuals are small juveniles or females, which has made the last couple of weeks particularly exciting when adult males began cluttering the place up. Adult males have the distinctive elephant like nose and are absolutely colossal. It is coming into elephant seal breeding time so the males have begun to claim territory in the hopes that females will come ashore to give birth to the pups that they were conceived 49-50 weeks earlier. So far there aren’t many females, but fingers crossed that we will get a couple of pups. They have already started being born on mainland South Georgia and look absolutely adorable. Bird Island isn’t a major breeding area for them, I can’t imagine why as it seems a pretty cool place to me, but there are usually a few pups. 

My whay a big nostril you have!

Here are a few facts about the Southern elephant seal to make you go “wow!” Males can grow to between 4.5-6.5 metres and can weigh up to 3700kg!! That is around 57 times as much as I weigh, a second good reason they are named after elephants. The females are smaller at between 2.5-4.0 metres, and weighing a measly 359-800kg. The pups are around 1.3m long when born and weighing 36-50kg (so less than me). However they put on up to 3.6kg per day and after less than a month can weigh 110-160kg with a length of 1.6m. The massive weight increase and fairly small increase in length means that they become extremely round and look close to exploding.  They need to go on this massive milk gorge as at only 3 weeks old their mothers leave them to fend for themselves. 

Male elephant seal yawning.

Another cool “ele” fact is that when at sea they have been recorded diving up to 1444m and for almost two hours underwater. As a scuba diver who can only go down a few measly tens of metres, this is pretty astounding. 

An ele and me. He doesn't actually look very big in this picture, but believe me he is.

One of our resident males has taken up “singing” at all hours of the night, and had me confused the first time it woke me up as it sounded like a bit like a tiger roaring but a bit lower in frequency. Luckily for me I was pretty confident that a tiger hadn’t gotten loose on the island so I could sleep on in peace. Hopefully he will find himself a girlfriend soon and we might have ourselves a pup to fawn over.

Is that a big rock? Nope, just an ele using a rock as a pillow.

A male ele with a male fur seal for size comparison.