The following post is authored by Caroline Schanche as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size.
For those who have seen elephant seals up close and personal, there is no questioning the fact that elephant seals are not afraid to put on the pounds. This guy surely doesn’t seem to mind his blubbery appearance:
In other words, there is a whole lot of fat on them. However, the word fat does not do them justice, so I took the liberty of looking up some synonyms (from thesaurus.com). Therefore we can also call elephant seals bulging, bull, butterball, chunky, heavy, hefty, heavyset, husky, meaty, plump, distended, solid, stout, swollen, beefy, brawny, burly, gargantuan, and my personal favorite: jelly-belly.
So sit back, relax and enjoy, as elephant seals show us the benefits of being a butterball.
1. Stay toasty
Elephant seals are the largest of all seals. The southern elephant seal Mirounga leonina can grow to be 8,800lbs and 20 ft long. In adult males, up to 50% of this mass comes from blubber, which is a thick layer made up of fat which has a dense system of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels. Since it is a thicker layer and contains more blood than normal fat layers, it provides a ton of insulation and is one of the main methods for thermoregulation. In other words, these elephant seals will stay warm and toasty all year long. More blubber means more thermoregulation, therefore bring on the brisket because its time to eat. Interestingly, some humans actually do need to do something similar when travelling to extremely cold places such as Antarctica to maintain warmth and to not become severely underweight, although hopefully they don’t get to super-sized conditions.
2. Get them Ladies
Larger elephant seals get more girls. It really is that simple. When the seals arrive at a beach for mating season the males all battle it out to find out who’s the boss: the alpha male, or the beach master. Elephant seals are known for this fighting and it usually goes a little something like this:
The beach master is the one who gets to copulate (not my favorite word) with the most females, which is exciting for him I guess. Does this apply to us? Is it always the biggest (read: chunkiest) guys who are more likely to get lucky? ehhhh, I’d have to go with no. If we’re talking muscle it might be different, but in this case the seals are a whole lot of blubber. Not my thing, but maybe its exactly what a female elephant seal wants.
3. Dive Deep into the Blue
Elephant seals dive very deep down to get to their favourite food sources of skates, rays, squid, octopus and eels. They can spend almost 90% of their entire day underwater and can swim down as deep as 300m! How can they do this? Well, all those blood vessels in the blubber as well as an unusually high blood volume along with higher levels of haemoglobin and myoglobin allow them to have a very high oxygen storage capacity. Kind of a cool thing to be able to do.
4. Be Your Own Buffet
All that blubber is good for a lot of things, but one of the best is that the seals can live off of it for months during mating season. Although at the end of it both the males and the females can have lost as much as a third of their body weight, they are still living the life if they don’t even have to worry about food. They have a specialized metabolism with water as a byproduct, and can live off the food stores in their blubber all mating season long, giving them time to focus on… other things.
I know I can get lazy when it comes to making food sometimes and it could be nice to have a fat store to keep you from getting starved, however with us it doesn’t really work that way. Getting fat doesn’t keep you from eating, although I wish it did.
5. Do the BlubbrBounce
Elephant seals clearly need their blubber so that they can present this masterpiece to the world:
6. Get away with being an scumbag
All week I have been tweeting about the scumbag elephant seal (shameless plug: @carolinetime9), because their large size and certain things they do could be considered particularly “scumbaggy” (see below).
However, no matter how much of an scumbag you are, nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to try to mess with you if you look like this:
Therefore, their size and intimidating (read: ugly) appearance means they can do whatever they want (at least the alpha males can) because very few can take them on.
To conclude, I think Elephant seals clearly make their mass work for them, and are arguably one of the species that can pull off such a great amount of blubber. They have good reasons for their bodacious, unlike us humans. Some might disagree though:
References
Haley, M.P., C.J. Deutsch, and B. Le Boeuf. “Size, Dominance and Copulatory Success in Male Northern Elephant Seals, Mirounga Angustirostris.” Animal Behaviour 48 (1994): 6. Print.
LeBoeuf, Burney J. Elephant Seals: Population, Ecology, Behavior, and Physiology. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 1994. Print.
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=1115
https://sites.google.com/site/elephantsealnotes/physical-characteristics
Battle of the living instrument platforms: Elephant Seals vs Narwhals
