San Miguel Island, part of California’s Channel Islands National Park, lies 50km off the coast of Santa Barbara. The waters surrounding this windswept island teem with marine life, particularly seals and sealions – in fact, Point Bennett, on the island’s western tip, hosts the largest congregation of these animals anywhere in the world. On any […]
Tag: fur seals
Avian Flu Wipes Out Nearly Half of Breeding Elephant Seals at World’s Largest Colony
The beaches of South Georgia, a remote splinter of ice and rock in the South Atlantic, should be a place of deafening, chaotic life. Normally, the shores host the planet’s largest gathering of southern elephant seals, Mirounga leonina. They are the largest seals on Earth, and they come by the tens of thousands to fight, […]
This bizarre Galápagos bird hunts giant deep-sea squid at night. How it does it is astonishing
Ghostly white forms drifted like white handkerchiefs on the brisk night breeze, dipping, rising, flapping, turning and tumbling over an inky black ocean. My small sailing boat rocked gently on the waves, while a handful of stars blinked between the clouds above. The shoreline lay some 30km ahead, just visible as a faint smudge on […]
Why are Cape fur seals in South Africa infected with rabies?
In May this year, a seal at a popular beach in Cape Town, South Africa, bit five surfers in a matter of minutes. The surfers laughed it off with characteristic nonchalance, but seal experts were concerned because this extremely unusual behaviour seemed part of what was becoming a pattern. Six days earlier, on the other […]