by Male elephant seals are not known for their paternal instincts. While sprawling on the beach during the breeding season, these unfriendly giants focus on mating with females and fighting other males. As they move their two-ton weight around the colony in pursuit of these goals, they will “run over the hatchlings” without hesitation, even crushing their own hatchlings, said Daniel Costa, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Which made the events of January 27, 2022 even more surprising. Sarah Allen and Matthew Lau, wildlife biologists with the National Park Service, were studying the northern elephant seal population at Point Reyes National Seashore, about 30 miles northwest of San Francisco. As they passed a colony resting on the beach, they noticed a cub resting with an adult female near the water.
“It was a warm day,” Dr. Allen recalled, so she assumed the two were cooling off in the wet sand.
When Dr. Allen and Mr. Lau passed through the colony again on their way back, the situation had changed. The rising tide had swept the pup out to sea and, as he was too small to swim, he struggled to stay afloat. The female was still on the beach, responding to the cub’s plaintive cries with her own cries, 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 “launched into the waves,” he added. When she reached the cub, she used her body to gently push him back to the beach, probably saving his life.
Dr. Allen has been watching elephant seals for over 40 years and has never seen anything like this before. “I reached out to a group of colleagues to ask if they had seen anything like this, and no one had,” he said. Dr. Costa agreed: “It’s completely out of the ordinary.”
Dr. Allen and her colleagues published his observation in January in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Dr Costa said the paper could encourage other seal scientists to keep an eye out for similar behaviour.
Northern elephant seals fast during the breeding season (roughly December to March), so males typically try to save energy for mating and defending themselves against rivals. By running down the beach like David Hasselhoff in “Baywatch,” this lifesaving seal was not only abandoning his harem of females but was also expending valuable energy.
This led Dr. Allen to interpret what she saw as a potential act of altruismwhen an organism sacrifices part of its own well-being to help another.
“He was so determined and directional coming out, and so quick,” she said. “And then when he came back, he was very gracious.”
While the male clearly intended to push the pup back to shore, it is impossible to fully understand his intentions in doing so. And since this is the first time anyone has seen something like this in elephant seals, Dr. Costa suspects it is a rare and unique behavior.
Altruism in the animal kingdom is most common between relatives, and because northern elephant seals were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century and then recovered, many of them are more closely related than they would otherwise be. Dr. Allen suspects that the male seal and the pup she saved are related in some way, but without genetic data, she can’t say for sure.
Elephant seals live extreme lives. When they’re not on the beach fasting, fighting and breeding, spend months at sea dive continuously for food, sometimes to a depth of up to a mile. “Elephant seals are complicated,” Dr. Allen said. “We only see a small fraction of his life.” She believes it’s time we start looking at male elephant seals in a new light.
Dr. Costa had thought that elephant seals generally lacked intellectual capacity of their sea lion cousins. But the dramatic Point Reyes beach rescue showed him there could be more than meets the eye.
“Maybe there’s more going on up there than I thought,” he said, laughing.
