Pinnipeds: The Difference Between Seals and Sea Lions

Otariid (above) and Phocid (below)

Mammals, being air-breathing animals, mostly live on land. Even when they hunt or graze for food in the water, they generally return to dry ground to do things like sleeping. Nonetheless, an aquatic lifestyle has evolved several times amongst mammals, and four of those lineages survive today. Perhaps the best adapted, because their young are born able to swim, are the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.) and the sirenians (such as manatees). The other two are sea otters and pinnipeds.

There are three recognised families of pinniped alive today: seals, sea lions, and another that includes only the walrus. All are distinguished by having flippers instead of feet, and a lifestyle that requires them to climb out of the water in order to breed and raise their young.

Leaving the walrus aside, the names I've just given to the other two families (and thus the title of the post) are really a bit misleading. This is because a group of animals called "fur seals" actually belong to what I'm calling the "sea lion family" (technically the Otariidae), and in casual usage, the term "seal" is often extended to pinnipeds in general. As a result, if we really want to be accurate, we need some term to distinguish members of the other family from seals more generally. The technical term for these animals is "phocids", but other commonly used terms include "true seals" and "earless seals".

Fossilised Hedgehog Ankles?

Many moons ago, back when I was at University (and studying zoology formally, instead of just as a hobby), the great majority of invertebrate-eating, non-flying, placental mammals were placed in a single group, the Insectivores. Even then there was some suspicion that this was a bit of a "wastebasket taxon", a group of animals placed together because it wasn't obvious what else to do with them. Molecular phylogenetics and cladistics were still in their infancy in those days, and, so far as I recall, the latter was never even mentioned.

Since then, things have changed, giving us a better picture of evolutionary relationships overall. Among other things, the number of animals that really belonged in the Insectivora was whittled away, as we discovered where the things we'd thrown into the wastebasket really belonged. The rump of the group, a genuine evolutionary unit that now goes by the less accessible name of "Eulipotyphla", does, however, still contain its most familiar members, animals such as shrews, moles, and hedgehogs.

Part of the problem is that these are relatively unspecialised mammals, in the sense that they remain broadly similar to what we think the first ever placentals looked like. Moles, of course, have adapted to a burrowing underground lifestyle that makes them fairly distinctive, but this is rather less true of their relatives. This also makes things difficult when we're looking at fossils, and we're trying to figure out just how far down the placental family tree any given suspected small insectivorous animal actually is.

Socially Awkward Mice

Many mammals have complex social lives, in which they have to interact with others of their kind in a multitude of different ways. Even those that predominantly live alone still require some degree of social interaction, especially during the breeding season, or when raising young. But for those that regularly encounter other members of their species, social interaction is particularly important, and its sophistication in primates was likely one of the key factors in the rise of humanity.

In the case of humans, of course, much of our social knowledge is built up as children, learning social rules through observation and experience as well as through more explicit instruction. And, while out ability to use language to impart detailed information is something that's essentially unique to us, the need for a suitable environment to fine tune social behaviour isn't something that just arose out of nowhere. Raising an animal in isolation from others of its species might not be as cruel as trying to do the same to a human child, but that's not to say that it wouldn't have some effect on them.

Ice Age Survivors in Hungary

Asiatic wild ass

The end of the Ice Ages saw a number of extinctions sweep across the world, particularly the Northern Hemisphere. Those animals that did not die out as the climate suddenly became warmer often moved further north, changing the composition of the local fauna wherever they had previously lived. This was no "mass extinction" of the sort associated with the end of the dinosaurs, but, on a smaller scale, it was nonetheless significant.

However, as we know all too well, it was by no means the last time that animals went extinct, let alone the last time that they have been eliminated from some local area. Many of these later extinctions were, of course, due to human activity, especially as we colonised new continents or discovered new islands.

But not necessarily all of them, since the climate has not, in fact, remained constant since the Ice Ages ended. After the sudden thaw that marks the boundary between the Pleistocene and the current, Holocene, epochs, warming continued, but slowed. It reached a peak somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 BC, and then began a slow cooling that has continued almost until the present. Even that cooling trend has had its fluctuations and reversals, most notably the Medieval Warm Period of the 10th to 13th centuries AD.