SLO County beaches are filling up with elephant seals. This is why
.JPG "This female elephant seal’s skin is starting to molt around one of her teats and at three cookie-cutter shark scars.")
The Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery north of San Simeon is full of seals now, but bulls with their signature trunk-like noses aren’t among them.
Adult females and young seals are on the beach in the spring, molting their skin.
Adult males, the ones with the floppy noses, are out at sea bulking up after three months without food during the breeding season. The bulls return, fat and blubbery, in the summer for their annual molt.
Elephant seals are arriving by the hundreds to rest on the beach during the busiest time of the year.
More seals are on the beach in May, even more than during breeding season. Look for unusual scars, colored identification tags and dyed identification markings.
Female elephant seals back from short migration
Female elephant seals make two annual migrations — a short one after the breeding season and a longer one after molting.
After giving birth and nursing their pups during the winter breeding season without food, they are thin and need to eat.
They leave their weaned pups on the beach and swim away for 10 weeks or so, feeding and putting on the blubber. They need the blubber to survive in their cold ocean home and to sustain them while they are on the beach for six weeks, when they do not eat at all.
The beach fills up with females and juveniles of both sexes.
That includes the 5,600 females who had pups on the seven or so miles of beaches that are considered the Piedras Blancas rookery and the females who didn’t have pups this year.
Molting skins
The elephant seals arrive on the beach one by one, on their individual time schedules.
New, pearly gray skin is already forming beneath their old skin.
Within a few days, the old skin begins to peel off — first around body openings such as eyes and around permanent scars. The old brown skin curls back and falls off.
The seals look ratty, but they’re fine. It’s normal, a “catastrophic molt.”
Elephant seals spend much of their lives 1,000 feet and deeper in the ocean. The pressure and the cold at that depth may account for the unusual annual molt.
Molting takes about six weeks.
Since seals arrive on the beach individually, starting and stopping at different times, seals are at all stages of molting in April and May.
Some already have their new pearl gray skin, while others are just arriving. Look for the ragged edges of skin peeling back as well as seals that are entirely brown or entirely gray.
Weaned pups
Nearly all the season’s weaned pups have left on their first migration. About half make it, to return in the fall.
Struggling pups get stranded on local beaches.
If you encounter a stranded pup, you can report it to the Marine Mammal Center operations center in Morro Bay at 805-771-8300. They will send out a team to evaluate the animal and rescue it if necessary.
Friends of the Elephant Seal
Visitors can learn about the seals from the brochures available at the boardwalk and on the Friends of the Elephant Seal website, www.elephantseal.org.
Friends of the Elephant Seal docents have not yet been cleared to return to helping visitors understand what they are seeing due to COVID-19 restrictions.