Name
- English: Southern elephant seal
- Latin: Mirounga leonina
- Dutch: Zuidelijke zeeolifant
Family
Zuidelijke zeeolifant
→ True seals
| In average | Males | Females | Pups | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Length in meters | 5,00 | 3 | 1,30 | |
| Weight in kilogram | 3.000-5.000 | 400-800 | 40-50 | |
| Life expectancy in years | Max. 23 | <20 | <14 | |
| Number of animals nowadays | ||||
| Colour(s) | Silvery grey | |||
| Habitat | aNTARCTICA, fALKLAND iSLANDS |
Additional information
The Southern elephant seal is the biggest secies of seals. Males are much bigger and heavyset than female seals. The body is silvery grey. The head gets more pale as they get older. The full grown males have a thick scarred neck shield and a erectile proboscis, which hangs down in front of the mouth when relaxed. They blow up their proboscis when they become aggressive. They use their proboscis as a sound box. Like this seals' head the proboscis becomes more pale too as the seals grow older. Males reach sexual maturity at 4 years age, females at 3-4 years age. These seals mainly eat cephapollods and some fishes. They live around Antarctica and the subarctic islands near the moving pack ice.
Southern elephant seals are good swimmers. Almost all the time they spend in the water they swim under the surface. These excellent divers sometimes dive to 1.250 meters deep and stay under water for about 2 hours. They prefer to go ashore on sandy and cobble beaches, but they also rest on ice, snow and rocky places. They also venture inland into tussock grass and other vegetation and lie frequently in mud wallows.
The southern elephant eal pups have a long, black, wooly fur at birth. The females give birth in September and October on shore and sometimes on shore ice. The pups shed around three weeks after birth and are nursed by their mothers for approximately 23 days. During the breeding season the seals' territoriality becomes strong, which is the reason for many fights.
During the 18th century this seal has been hunted on a large sclae. The southern elephant seal almost extinct, but a small group of these seals survived and their population has been grown quickly in the 19th and 20th century. In 1991 the population estimates 700.000 and 800.000 animals of this species. Allthough some breeding populations in the antarctic portion of the Indian and Pacific oceans have been declining, the Atlantic portion seems to be stable or increasing.