Fur Seals Going on a Winter Holiday

Once each year, animals like seals and sea lions haul themselves out of the water to spend time on rookeries located on remote coasts or distant islands. Once there, the females give birth to their young, raise them to the point that they can swim effectively, and then take part in the long orgy of reproduction during which the males fight for their affections. And then they all return to the water again, living out the rest of the year at sea.

For obvious reasons, nature documentaries tend to focus on this time of a seal's life. Scientists, too, know rather more about what the animals are up to when they're on land where they can see them, than they do about what they're up to when they're away from the coasts. Yet, fun though reproduction undoubtedly is, most of a seal's life is spent at sea, not at their annual breeding grounds. With modern tracking technology, however, we're beginning to get a better picture of what seals do during this time, and where they do it.

Take the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus). Technically, these aren't seals, in the sense that they don't belong to the seal family, bur rather to the sea lion family. That's a bit confusing, so the term 'seal' is often used more broadly than that, and the two families are distinguished as 'earless seals' (the actual seal family, the Phocidae) and 'eared seals' (the sea lion family, including, of course, the sea lions themselves). That is, you can either consider sea lions to be a special kind of seal, or fur seals to be a special kind of sea lion. Or both, if you must. Take your pick.