The northern elephant seal is slightly smaller than its relative - the southern elephant seal ( Mirounga leonina ). Males reach a length of 4-5 m and weigh 1.2-2.3 tons (in some cases more than 2.7 tons), while females are usually no larger than 2.5-3.6 m and weigh 400-900 kg . Sexual dimorphism is less pronounced than that of the southern species. The larger trunk , however, is in males, which reaches 30 cm.
Females feed in the open ocean, while males prefer to search for food along the continental shelf. Among their victims, squid (including the largest species, such as the giant squid ), bony fish , crustaceans , stingrays and sharks are noted. Sea elephants do not drink water, since they get it from fats [2] .
Sea elephants do not have a developed echolocation system, like cetaceans , and under water they orient themselves due to sight and vibrissae , sensitive to vibrations. Killer whales can hunt elephant seals. They cope even with adult males, but prefer to attack young animals. Very large white sharks can also be dangerous for young and small females, which attack from an ambush and paralyze them with bites over their limbs, after which they wait (sometimes for several hours) for the victim to bleed and drown, weakening it with additional attacks. Traces of shark teeth were found even on the bodies of adult males, but cases of successful shark attacks on such large animals are still unknown [3] .
In northern elephant seals, mating occurs in February. After an 11-month pregnancy in January of the following year, cubs are born. In April-May of the same year they leave the coast.
The northern elephant seal was formerly distributed throughout the western coast of North America from Alaska to Baja California . In the 19th century , however, mass extermination of these animals began for the sake of blubbering . Each year, thousands of elephant seals became victims of hunters and soon this species was already considered extinct . Only one small colony, consisting of less than a hundred individuals, survived on the Mexican island of Guadalupe . After its discovery, the northern elephant seals were taken under protection.
In the 1930s , elephant seals came out for mating on land on the California Channel Islands . Currently, northern elephant seals are found on many islands along the western coast of the continent. In the north, their range reaches the Farallon Islands, and outside the mating season even to Vancouver Island . Along the SR 1 motorway between Los Angeles and San Francisco , elephant elephants in some places are becoming a tourist attraction.
The population is increasing by 15% every year, and today this species is no longer classified as a serious threat. However, the fact that the abundance of northern elephant seals passed through a narrow “ bottleneck ” led to an extremely low genetic diversity of living individuals, which could become a serious problem under changing environmental conditions.
Creating in 2016 for Leiden University (the Netherlands ) her Dutch meme figure “Waiting” ( lat. Homunculus loxodontus ) by the Dutch artist Margrit van Breevoort ( Dutch Margriet van Breevoort ) meant the northern elephant , possessing, in contrast to its larger southern relative, a pronounced trunk.
