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The
northern elephant seal is a large, ocean going seal that hauls
out onto land to breed, molt, or rest in a few places along
the Pacific Coast of North America. It spends most of its life
at sea.
The major
breeding colonies are off California and Baja California but
they also take to beaches between Baja California and British
Columbia, Hawaii and Japan (Wilson and Ruff 1999). The history
of contact between humans and the elephant seal is both tragic
and heroic. They were slaughtered by the thousands in the
1800s for their blubber and extirpated from California in the
mid 1800s. By the early 1900s, only a few hundred were alive
on Isle de Guadalupe, Baja California (Wilson and Ruff 1999).
Hunting was halted and slowly the population recovered to over
100,000 individuals by 1992. Elephant seals undergo a molt
each spring or summer when they haul out of the water. They
appear to be sick as the fur falls out which has led to some
being mistakenly killed. The elephant seal makes the longest
and deepest dives of any marine mammal (Le Bouef and Laws
1994).
References
Le Boeuf, B.J. and R.M. Laws. 1994.
Elephant
seals: population ecology, behavior, and physiology. University
of California Press, Berkeley. .
Reeves, R. R. B. S. Stewart, P. J. Clapham and J. A. Powell.
2002. Guide to marine mammals of the world. National Audubon
Society, New York.
Wilson, D.
and S. Ruff. 1999. Smithsonian book of North American mammals.
UBC Press, Vancouver.
Stewart, B.S. and R. L. DeLong. 1994a.
Postbreeding foraging migrations of northern elephant seals.
in B. J.
Le Boeuf and R.M. Laws (eds.).
Elephant
seals: population ecology, behavior, and physiology. University
of California Press, Berkeley
Stewart, B.S., P.K. Yochem, H.R. Huber, R.L.
DeLong, R.J. Jameson, W.J. Sydeman, S.G.
Allen, and B. J. Le Boeuf . 1994b.
History and Present Status of the Northern Elephant Seal
Population in B. J.
Le Boeuf and R.M. Laws (eds.).
Elephant
seals: population ecology, behavior, and physiology. University
of California Press, Berkeley..
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