Male elephant seals are not known for their paternal instincts. While sprawling on the beach during the breeding season, these non-gentleman giants focus on mating with females and fighting other males. As they push their two-ton bulk around the colony in pursuit of these goals, “they’ll pop the pups” without hesitation, even crushing their own offspring, said Daniel Costa, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Which made the events of January 27, 2022, even more impressive. Sarah Allen and Matthew Lau, wildlife biologists with the National Park Service, were surveying the northern elephant seal population at Point Reyes National Seashore, about 30 miles northwest of San Francisco. As they passed a colony relaxing on the beach, they noticed a young pup resting with an adult female near the water.
“It was a hot day,” Dr. Allen recalls, so she thought the two were cooling off on the wet sand.
When Dr. Allen and Mr. Lau passed the colony again on their way back, the situation had changed. The rising tide had pulled the puppy out to sea and, too small to swim, it was struggling to stay afloat. The female was still on the beach, responding to the pup’s plaintive cries with calls of her own, which attracted the attention of a nearby male.
“We thought, Oh, he’s going to try to mate with her,” Dr. Allen said.
Instead, he sniffed the female and then “poured into the surf,” he added. When he reached the pup, he used his body to gently push it back onto the beach – likely saving its life.
Dr. Allen has observed elephant seals for more than 40 years and had never seen anything like it. “I contacted a bunch of colleagues asking if they had seen anything like this and no one had,” he said. Dr. Costa agreed: “It’s completely unusual.”
Dr. Allen and colleagues published their observation in January in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Dr Costa said the article could encourage other seal scientists to be on the lookout for similar behaviour.
The northern elephant seals quickly during the breeding season (around December to March), so males usually try to save their energy for mating and fending off rivals. Rushing down to the beach like David Hasselhoff in ‘Baywatch’, this lifeguard of a seal was not only abandoning his harem of females but also expending precious energy.
This led Dr. Allen to interpret what she saw as a possibility act of altruismwhen one organism sacrifices some of its own well-being to help another.
“He was so determined and driven to get out there, and so fast,” she said. “And then coming back in, he was so kind.”
While the male clearly intended to push the pup back to shore, it is impossible to fully understand his intentions in doing so. And because this is the first time anyone has seen anything like this from elephant seals, Dr Costa suspects it was a rare isolated behaviour.
Altruism in the animal kingdom is most common among relatives, and because northern elephant seals were hunted to extinction in the 19th century and have since recovered, many of them are more closely related than they would otherwise be. Dr. Allen suspects the male seal and the pup she rescued are related in some way, but without genetic data, she can’t say for sure.
Elephant seals live extreme lives. When they are not on the beach fasting, fighting and breeding, they they spend months at sea continuous dives for food — sometimes up to a mile. “Elephant seals are complicated,” Dr Allen said. “We only see a small fraction of their lives.” He believes it’s time to start looking at male elephant seals in a new light.
Dr. Costa had thought that elephant seals generally did not brain power of their sea lion cousins. But the dramatic rescue on the beach at Point Reyes showed him there may be more than meets the eye.
“Maybe there’s more going on up there than I thought,” he said with a laugh.