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Southern Elephant Seal — printable fact sheet
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Southern Elephant Seal
Mirounga leonina
The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) is the largest carnivoran that has ever lived, and it holds the record for the most extreme sexual size dimorphism of any mammal: a beachmaster bull can reach 5 metres and 3,000 to 4,000 kilograms, six to eight times the mass of a fe…
Did you know?
- Southern Elephant Seals spend about 90% of their lives underwater, often diving continuously for weeks at a time.
- A big bull can weigh eight times as much as a female, the widest sex difference of any mammal. Elephant seals spend about 90 per cent of their lives submerged and only surface for a couple of minutes between dives. They fast completely during the breeding season and the moult, and a bull may lose a third of his body weight in a few weeks. Instruments glued to their heads have produced some of the best oceanographic data on the Southern Ocean, since the seals routinely visit places no research ship can reach.
What I learned
Draw the southern elephant seal
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