Elephant Seal ... Your last time?

B

Baldur

Well-Known Member
I have only seen one elephant seal in my entire zoo time ('Sharky' in Berlin Zoo 1999, it died the year after, the last in Europe to my knowledge) and have been somewhat obsessed with them for years, as with most marine mammals, but elephant seals in particular. I have found myself staring at old elephant seal pools (such as in Antwerp, Antibes and Stuttgart) even if they by then only had things like Common Seals, trying to picture the gigantic things still swimming around in them.

That was the last (and only) time seeing an elephant seal? But what about you? I would like to trace the route elephant seals followed from being a bit common (in the larger zoos at least) after WWII and up until there was none left. Can you possibly recall you last time seeing them and:

1) What collection and when?
2) How many were they?
3) Large or young and small?
4) Southern or Northern?
5) Were they with anything, such as Common Seal, Californian Sealion or any type of Penguin?

Rehabs do pop up occasionally in the States. A blind one was housed at the Oregon Zoo but it died some years ago and San Francisco Zoo housed some pups whilst a rehab centre nearby underwent construction last year. Guess SeaWorld San Diego always has rehabs to care for, but never in public? Only been there once and saw none.

Mundo Marino in Buenos Aires aparently use elephant seals for shows just like all other parks use sealions. Possibly a few others in Argentina and Chile have them. I have heard about a marine park in South Africa which aparently has some but not managed to dig up the name. In Japan at least one, Futami Sea Paradise, has them, and supposedly breeds! Can anyone shed further light on them or been to these places? I have put in effort over the years to find out more, but for me its language. Besides, the internet is only good up to a limit.
 
I saw a few juveniles and an adult male northern elephant seals in the wild in California in 2004. One woman thought they were giant slugs!
 
I saw hundreds of them in the wild. They flock to Ano Nuevo (south of San Francisco) and literally cover the beach. I even got to see some males mock-fighting. This was back in 1993, I think.
 
I saw a southern elephant seal at Flamingoland in 1970. It was later sent to Dudley Zoo.
 
A marine park that used to be on the Gold coast use to have a pair of Southern elephant seals in the early 80s, the park did close down at a later point, I cant remeber if they were sent to another park or not
 
Saw one northern elephant seal in Antwerp in 1990's, in a tiny pool with harbour seal. I doubt if it could even swim a circle in this tiny pool.

I also saw lots of wild southern elephant seals in Patagonia. Not exciting, everybody says they look like giant slugs.

BTW - I wonder if wild elephant seals were ever filmed hunting underwater? Perhaps they are more lively there.

P.S. Stuttgart zoo bred them (once?) in 1960's(?).
 
The U.K collections that have held them in the past that i know of are London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Dudley, Cleethorpes and flamingoland.
 
I've ssen northen elephant sela sin the wild in 2005, and the last one I've ssen ina zoow as " Sharky " in Berlin Zoo in 2000. I've ssen sveeral times " Charly", the adult male which has lived a long time in Stuttgart. I can remember " King", the big male at Frankfurt Zoo, but I was still a child, as he died in 1979.

Stuttgart has bred one time an elephant seal, the young was born in 1965, but is had to be handraised. It died the same yera. Berlin handraised one in 1977, but it died also a few month later. Antwerp had a mother raised young,"Eric", he was send to Berlin Zoo.

So many elephant seals died in the zoos, so its better to let them in the wild.It's impossible to keep them in captivity.
 
taronga zoo had some southern elephant seals in their collection in the late 80's and early 90's.
 
Jurek7 said:
BTW - I wonder if wild elephant seals were ever filmed hunting underwater? Perhaps they are more lively there.
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I doubt they have been. Elephant seals are deep-divers so the waters they hunt in are pitch black (it could be done with attached cameras as has been done with sperm whales but it wouldn't be very interesting viewing). There is a theory that they hunt so deep so as to avoid attack by great whites which are mainly near the surface. Transmitters on individual seals show that they dive as deep as 630 metres (2067 feet) and make up to sixty dives per day, 24 hours a day, resting at the surface for only three or four minutes between dives. It has been calculated they spend as much as ninety percent of their lives under water. An accompanying theory is that the elephant seals sleep while descending to hunting depth.

EDIT: the critter-cam has been used on elephant seals http://www.nationalgeographic.com/crittercam/about.html
 
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Is it true there's a tiny colony of Ele Seals that still breed at a place called 'the Nuggets' on the coast between Dunedin & Invercargill on the South Island of NZ?. I was told there are two or three calves born there most years. Went to look for them once but never saw any sign....
 
Thanks, Chlidonias!

All elephant seal pools I know were very small, and they could barely move in them. So they looked ugly, like giant slugs. Perhaps it is good that zoos stopped keeping them.

BTW, how are walruses faring in zoos? Is it true, that almost all have tusks removed because of concrete pool floors?
 
2008 standards weren't there when elephant seals were around in zoos, a decade or so ago at least. And elephants, another giants, did not get much space either at the time, it is now in the past few years that we are seeing paddocks suiting them. So if elephant seals would be brought again into zoos, they too would get pools suiting them. So it is really unfair to judge past zoo traditions because they didn't have or do what we do in the present. They had to make the mistakes so that we could be successful.

Walruses, where they are they seem to be doing OK, even if breeding is not always the case. Harderwijk is one. But when you mention tusks, is the story true that the Hagenbecks, when they had walruses, always refused to tell other zoos how they prevented their animals from loosing their tusks? It had something to do with the exhibit material so when they lifted themselves out of the pool using the tusks, like walruses do, the tusks did not go down with time. Others have mastered it since, however, the SeaWorlds usually have tuskers.
 
Baldur said:
Walruses, It had something to do with the exhibit material so when they lifted themselves out of the pool using the tusks, like walruses do, the tusks did not go down with time. Others have mastered it since, however, the SeaWorlds usually have tuskers.
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The obvious way to go would be to incoroprate a beach/landing area in the pool so the Walrus can haul out without having to use their tusks at all on hard surfaces.
 
Pertinax said:
Is it true there's a tiny colony of Ele Seals that still breed at a place called 'the Nuggets' on the coast between Dunedin & Invercargill on the South Island of NZ?. I was told there are two or three calves born there most years. Went to look for them once but never saw any sign....
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Nugget Point (at the Nuggets) is widely quoted as being the only place in NZ where elephant seals, NZ fur seals and Hooker's sealions coexist. When the Maori arrived in NZ all three species had breeding colonies around the country's shoreline but the elephants and sealions had been wiped out by the time Europeans arrived. The European sealers tried doing the same to the fur seals but failed (somewhat surprisingly), and once sealing had stopped the fur seal numbers rebounded and they are now common again. Sealions are starting to make a slow recovery; there have been some births on the mainland and they are fairly regular visitors. Elephant seal births on the mainland are very rare although they do occasionally occur (but not nearly as commonly as you had been told -- there may have been confusion with sealions), and there are always at least a few subadults somewhere around the southern coasts. So despite the claims for Nugget Point, while you've got a good chance of seeing all three species there, it could equally likely happen at any other beach around the south.

Some elephant seals are regular visitors to NZ. There was a female called Elisabeth who came to the beach near my place every year when I was young and sometimes turned up quite a way up the city's River Avon. A later female that arrived on my beach was attacked by some young louts who poured petrol on her and set her alight; she escaped to the water and survived with scarring. Its unbelievable how stupid some people can be. I would have loved to have caught those people myself and taught them a lesson they wouldn't forget! Another famous individual, a male called Dumbo, hauled up for many years running in a farmer's seaside paddock and hung out with the cows. At one stage there was also a full-grown adult male who took to attacking cars in beach-side parking lots!
 
My last elephant seal in a zoo was the already mentioned 'Sharky'.

The Enoshima Aquarium in Japan kept an Southern Elephant Seal called Minazo till 2005, which became something like an Internet/popular media icon.
Popular Enoshima aquarium seal dies after 10 1/2-year run | The Japan Times Online
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1914006

The Sausalito Marine Mammal Center also keeps now and then Northern elephant seals.

There are several problems in terms of apt walrus husbandry which inhibit their further establishment in more zoos:
-the highly expensive husbandry and the question of obtaining "new" animals
-the mentioned tusk problem (which is also influenced by the animals' contact with the floor of the tanks) BTW: has anyone seen the ones kept at Moscow Zoo?
-the strange habit of some specimens to suck out the sealing compounds found in their enclosure (similiar to the behaviour of one of the former beluga whales at Duisburg Zoo).
 
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Chlidonias said:
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Some elephant seals are regular visitors to NZ. At one stage there was also a full-grown adult male who took to attacking cars in beach-side parking lots!
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Thanks for all the info about Elephant seals in NZ. I did see one- I think it was a subadult male, on a beach near Dunedin- unfortunately I was the wrong side of the estuary to get close to it. I'd heard of one that associated with cows too.
 
We have had in the near past the odd elephant seal come ashore in Victoria ending up in some farmers paddocks chasing some poor old dairy cows around
 
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