After spending a good chunk of time over the last couple of days pulling together the Carnival of the Capitalists for this week, had a chance to pop down to Año Nuevo State Reserve with the youngsters for a couple of hours. Año Nuevo is just a short drive down the coast from Half Moon Bay, and just north of Santa Cruz. It also is home to the continental United States’ largest colony of elephant seals. From the ANSR web site:
“Fifty-five miles south of San Francisco and the Golden Gate, a low, rocky, windswept point juts out into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish maritime explorer Sebastian Vizcaino sailed by the point on January 3, 1603. His diarist and chaplain of the expedition, Father Antonio de la Ascension, named it Punta de Año Nuevo (New Year’s Point) for the day on which they sighted it in 1603.
Today, the point remains much as Vizcaino saw it from his passing ship. Lonely, undeveloped, wild. Elephant seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals come ashore to rest, mate, and give birth in the sand dunes or on the beaches and offshore islands. It is a unique and unforgettable natural spectacle that hundreds of thousands of people come to witness each year.
Año Nuevo State Reserve is the site of the largest mainland breeding colony in the world for the northern elephant seal, and the interpretive program has attracted increasing interest every winter for the past 19 years. People who hope to see the seals during the winter breeding season are urged to get their reservations early. The males battle for mates on the beaches and the females give birth to their pups on the dunes.”
These animals are massive. Males run about 4,000 pounds, with the largest specimens tipping the scales at over 5,000 pounds.
They also are very protective of their territory, with the bigger alpha males asserting their dominance over smaller, weaker males at any chance. (It is not clear whether the victorious males tell off-color jokes to their seal buddies and roar off in their Camaros after these encounters.)
Link to video of elephant seals battling (4MB, voiceover from the ANSR docent).
This is Part 1. Link to Part 2.