Cheek by jowl

The beach is really full now, packed solid with seals. There are more seals on the beach during the May-June molting season than during the breeding season., All the juveniles come back to the beach at this time of year, as well as the adult females. The youngsters leave the beach to the grown-ups and the new babies during the winter breeding season.

 Many have already completed molting their skin, leaving them with an attractive pearl gray coat. That soon fades to brown.

 Seals show up with amazing scars. This one looks like she nearly had her head bitten off. She somehow lived to tell the tale.

Several showed multiple cookie cutter shark scars, like these.

Low tide

There was an exceptionally low tide last week during the time I was at the bluff, a minus tide. It left some pools of water around the rocks that are usually immersed. The young seals took advantage of it and played. That's unusual. These seals are pretty humorless, or perhaps I should say pragmatic. If it's not about the basics, they aren't doing it. But on this day, they cavorted in the water.

Some preferred to snooze in the quiet kelp beds.

Another busy day at the beach.

Sand and sun

It's quiet on the beach these days. Careful youngsters scuffle in the surf, taking an opportunity to build their fighting skills and exercise their dominance instincts. Most remain on the bech, sleeping and letting their skin peel off.

Their skin naturally molts once a year. In the spring, it's the adult females and juveniles of both sexes who are losing their skin. Adult males return in the summer for their molt.

On a sunny, warm day last week, seals up and down the beach were flipping sand onto their backs, like this female.

This is the highest population of seals on the beach, more event than during breeding season. Friends of the Elephant Seal has graphs showing population changes on its site. Note the differences in scale -- many more females and juveniles than adult males.

Sometimes they just bury their noses in the sand.

Driving Miss Elephant Seal

The squawking is loud, but not unbearable. The fishy stink is worse. But the elephant seal pups love it. That’s their main food.

They aren’t usually enclosed in a van, driving the highway across the mountains, though. In their open air habitat along the coast, who cares that they smell like fish?

These pups, safe in animal carriers, ride in an air-conditioned van on a trip they could never have imagined they’d take. But once they crossed paths with humans, they were rescued. Now they are on their way to the next step of their rehabilitation. As soon as they are strong enough, they’ll be released to their ocean home.

Many northern elephant seal pups launch into their first migration without incident. Others can’t catch enough food and wash up on the beach, hungry and tired. When they do, marine mammal rescuers collect them and feed them until they gain enough weight to have the energy to take on their ocean world again.

We drove this group of seven seals as far as King City, where we met a driver from Monterey and exchanged vans with her. That’s a lot easier and less alarming to the seals than trying to move the carriers from one van to the other. She took over the northern half of the trip, to the Marine Mammal Center hospital in Sausalito.

The seals weren’t all that sick. Underweight and resting on the wrong (read: populated) beaches, they’ll get some food – they were all able to eat fish on their own -- and soon be on their way. Orange tags on their back flippers will identify them as animals who have been rescued and released, in case they are ever sighted again.

The MMC triage center in Morro Bay needed to move them out, to make room for 15 starving sea lion pups scheduled to arrive from Southern California later that day. Transferring them from their carriers to the pens was hectic – two broke out and skittered around the courtyard. They were eventually herded into their pens and fed. Eleven of them were able to eat fish on their own. The other four were too weak, and will be tube fed a fishy formula to get them stronger.

2013 pups born

Brian Hatfield, USGS Wildlife Biologist, gave this report:

 2013 Piedras Blancas Northern Elephant Seal Breeding Season Summary

The elephants seal colony at Piedras Blancas continues to grow. The total number of live pups,
weaners (weaned pups), and orphaned pups counted at the end of the 2013 season was just over
4,800 seals - up 4% from the 2012 season (Figure 1). Based on a rough estimate of the actual
number of births, it appears that pre-weaning mortality was fairly low again this year (about 7%),
which is not surprising considering we had another mild winter. There were increases in three of
six survey segments compared to last year, with the biggest increase being in the area from
Arroyo Laguna and South, followed by the area from Pt. Piedras Blancas to South Point (Figure
2). With the exception of a single pup born (and weaned) just up coast of the Piedras Blancas
Motel (site), there was no expansion of the breeding range along the coast.
* does not include VP-3 ** includes cove just south of dunes ^ does not include beach at Arroyo Laguna

Giant Squid research

This isn't directly related to elephant seals, but Humboldt squid are one of their prey species. I'm not sure whether anyone knows if elephant seals eat giant squid, although I can't imagine they would turn down the chance to eat one. They certainly share those deep sea waters. From The Scientist:

© DAVID PAUL
The deep sea-dwelling giant squid Arciteuthis has turned up all over the world. But, whether in Florida or Japan, the invertebrates are all members of the same species, according to a paper published today (March 20) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  Analyses of 43 squid from diverse locations showed that their mitochondrial DNA varies surprisingly little.
This lack of genetic diversity is puzzling. While giant squid are elusive, the researchers wrote, their populations are believed to be relatively large and geographically spread out—qualities usually associated with high diversity. The first live giant squid was spotted in 2004, and the Discovery Channel published the first video of the species earlier this year. But partially digested fragments of the cephalopods are found frequently in the stomachs of a key predator, the sperm whale, and scientists believe that they wouldn’t be able to support such common predation if their global population were small.
“It is difficult to reconcile this low genetic diversity with the reasonable assumption that Architeuthis are globally distributed with relatively large population size,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
The team collected 43 squid from diverse locations, including New Zealand, South Africa, and the Falkland Islands. They were found floating dead in the water, washed up on beaches, or as accidental by-catch from deep-sea fishermen.
The researchers said that there were many possible explanations for their findings. The squid’s mitochondria may have evolved unusually slowly, or they could have recently expanded from a small population to a large, widely distributed one. But the explanation they considered most likely was that the squid were unusually well traveled.
This could mean that the squid, which can grow as big as 18 meters in length, migrate through the oceans as adults. But past studies had shown that they are generally restricted to small hunting ranges. Instead, the researchers said, the squid may float long distances on sea currents in a juvenile, larva-like form, keeping geographically separate squid populations from forming.

Learning to swim

These two babies practice holding their breath in the shallows along the Piedras Blancas beach.

The beach is dominated by weaners now.

The few adult males left are catching up on sleep. They'll soon return to the ocean to eat. Most are so thin now!