a blubber of seals

Another creature that is superbly adapted to a life in cold water but that has to struggle ashore for certain parts of the life cycle is the elephant seal.  These were mostly lying around moulting when we visited.  Every so often one would snort, or hump its massive body a few metres along the beach (moving rather in the manner of a giant maggot), or open its mouth wide and belch – they were fat, slobby and bad-mannered!  The males were bad-tempered too, easily upset by another elephant seal – or we humans getting too close – when they would inflate their nose sacs, rear up the front half of their bodies, and if another elephant seal responded in the same manner then a fight would ensue, the two seals thudding their bodies into each other whilst each tried to get a bite into the other’s neck region.

However when lying calmly on the sand they had the largest, most appealing puppy-dog eyes…

The males also have a pretty hard life, totally geared towards gaining a stretch of beach with females on it, which the victor apparently has to fight for, on around an hourly basis, to retain it against the other males who challenge him.  A successful male gets to mate with all the females on the beach – which can be around fifty – but many males never get control of a beach and thus never get the chance to mate at any point during their lives.  The constant fighting for this right takes its toll and the average male elephant seal lives only half as long as the average female.

Quite a bit smaller than the elephant seals are the Antarctic fur seals, of which we saw many hundreds (or perhaps thousands).  They are also quite appealing when calm, but frequently bad-tempered and aggressive and some of our group found it hard to follow the instructions when challenged – to make yourself big and noisy rather than running away!  Their babies were incredibly cute and also tried to intimidate us but without any success whatsoever.

Unusually we didn’t get to see any weddell seals, but we saw a number of crabeater seals lounging on icebergs.  These are the second most numerous mammal on earth (second to human beings), which I thought was amazing given how few people ever see one.  We also saw a number of whales, mostly humpbacks but a few other species including, possibly, a blue whale.  The humpbacks were feeding in groups and put on quite a display – I think most of us eventually managed to get the classic photo of a tail fluke.