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Northern Elephant Seal — printable fact sheet
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Northern Elephant Seal
Mirounga angustirostris
Mirounga angustirostris is one of the deepest-diving air-breathing animals in the world, routinely working at 300 to 800 m and recorded past 1,700 m, and it spends roughly 90 percent of its life at sea and about 80 percent of that submerged — surfacing for only two or three minu…
Did you know?
- Despite their massive size, Northern Elephant Seals can travel thousands of kilometers in a single migration between feeding and breeding grounds.
- Elephant seals sleep while diving, drifting downward in a slow spiral hundreds of metres below the surface, and a 2023 study using brain-wave loggers found they average only about two hours of sleep a day at sea — comparable to an elephant. During the annual catastrophic moult they shed skin and fur in ragged sheets and must stay ashore for a month, unable to feed. Fasting bulls on the breeding beach can go over 100 days without food or water, losing a third of their body weight.
What I learned
Draw the northern elephant seal
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