Northern elephant seal
Mirounga angustirostris
— Where the name comes from
Mirounga comes from neither Greek nor Latin: it is a transcription of miouroung, the name Aboriginal Australians gave the animal, one of the rare cases in which an indigenous language enters the scientific nomenclature of mammals. The epithet angustirostris is Latin, “narrow-snouted”, and separates this species from its southern cousin. Elephant, of course, for the adult male’s proboscis.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Open sea for most of the year, sandy beaches for breeding and moult
- Range
- The north-eastern Pacific, from Baja California to Alaska; breeding colonies in California and Mexico
- Size
- 4–5 m and up to 2,300 kg for the male, 2.5–3 m and 600 kg for the female
- Diet
- Carnivore — squid, deep-water fish, rays
- Lifespan
- 14 years for the male, up to 20 for the female
— Characteristics
- 01
It dives past 1,500 metres and stays under for up to two hours, the record among non-cetacean mammals.
- 02
It spends nine months a year at sea, sleeping during dives in free fall towards the bottom.
- 03
The male fasts for three months through the breeding season, losing a third of his body weight.
— What sets it apart
By the end of the 19th century hunting for oil had reduced it to a single surviving group on Guadalupe Island: between twenty and a hundred animals, perhaps fewer. From that bottleneck descend all two hundred thousand northern elephant seals that now crowd the Californian beaches — a spectacular recovery that hides an invisible cost. Analysing their DNA turns up almost no variability: the species has come back in numbers while staying genetically poor, and no head count can restore the diversity it lost in those few decades.
