More elephant seals are at SLO County beach than any other time of year. Here’s what you’ll see

More northern elephant seals are on the beach in May at the Piedras Blancas rookery north of San Simeon than any other time of the year.

Adult females, returned from their short migration, sleep on the sand.

Juveniles, both male and female, have been out to sea all winter. They now fill out the beach crowd.

Young males spar while their elders take advantage of the time to rest and all molt their skin.

Molting

The obvious change the seals undergo is molting their skin. The old brown skin and hair peels off in chunks, exposing new skin and hair underneath.

Look for pearly gray seals next to brown and tan seals.

Check out the ones with skin curling off around their eyes and noses. Old scars also start peeling back the molted skin.

The process carries its own distinctive aroma, from all those mammals shedding skin on the beach. A few of the less thoughtful have orange feces smeared on their back ends.

It’s a good thing the seals don’t defecate on the beach, or the smell would chase visitors off the boardwalk. It’s just a few outliers who add to the smell.

The seals stop foraging for food a day or two before they arrive, and don’t eat anything while they are on the beach. Their digestive and metabolic processes change.

My observation is that arriving seals often defecate just before they arrive on the beach, leaving an orange bloom behind them.

Female elephant seals get ready for migration

The female elephant seals are undergoing changes as the eggs that were fertilized back during the breeding season now implant in their uterine walls and begin to develop into embryos.

The process is called delayed implantation.

After fertilization, the egg divides a few times and then pauses.

The process gives the mother time to restore her weight so that she is strong enough to carry the pregnancy to term.

Starting now, gestation takes about eight months.

The females will leave the beach in a month or so. They will return in January, after their long migration, to have their pups.

Look for marks on seals, other species

With research projects ramping up at Cal Poly and other locations, marked seals are more commonly seen on the beach.

All marks are temporary, since they come off with the molted skin.

Other wildlife species share the beach in northern San Luis Obispo County. A Guadalupe fur seal pup and a California sea lion pup hauled out on the beach recently.

Every day brings different animals and birds to the viewpoint. The elephant seal viewpoint off Highway 1 north of San Simeon is easy to access but provides world-class wildlife viewing.

NOAA celebrates 50 years of marine sanctuaries

The Piedras Blancas beach is within the borders of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, one of 15 that protect seascapes, wildlife and maritime heritage resources.

To celebrate 50 years of national marine sanctuaries, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has compiled a series of resource collections. Peruse the many events, photos, lesson plans, maps and other educational materials at sanctuaries.noaa.gov/50.

One covers Ocean Sound and Impact of Noise.

The SanctSound Monitoring Project offers a portal that provides downloadable tools for comparing ocean sound, with six tutorials to help use the data.