Bull elephant seals take over SLO County beaches. How will they spend the rest of summer?

It’s bull elephant seals’ turn to take over the beach at the Piedras Blancas rookery north of San Simeon.

The big male elephant seals are here to rest and shed their skin in July and August, the annual molt.

Summer marks the conclusion of the short post-breeding migration. The seals on the beach are mostly pretty good size, but they will get a lot bigger during the long migration, from August to November.

Female seals and juveniles were on the beach in May and June. They have returned to the ocean, leaving the beach to the bigger males.

The seals currently on the beach are mostly subadults about 6 years old and older, and fully adult males 8 years and older.

The size of an elephant seal’s nose is a rough indicator of age. It starts growing when the seal is about 5 years old, and continues throughout its life.

A few juveniles, and even some of last year’s pups, now called young of the year, find places to rest among their much larger cousins.

Seals sleeping on their sides breathe only through the nostril that is on the opposite side from the sand. It’s a reflex behavior, shutting the nostril close to the sand to avoid inhaling sand.

This ability to close one nostril independent of the other may be related to their adaptation to deep diving under high pressure.

Molting

All elephant seals molt their skin once a year.

Last year’s brown and tan skin, actually a layer of keratin, peels off in chunks, taking the hair with it. Beneath it is a pearly gray or silver coat. They look terrible, but it’s normal.

In his book “Elephant Seals: Pushing the limits on land and at sea,” Burney LeBoeuf recounts an incident in the 1960s in which a local resident called the police to report a sickly-looking elephant seal.

A police officer came out and agreed that the seal looked bad, and shot it to put it out of its misery.

“Of course, the seal was fine,” LeBoeuf writes, “it was just molting.”

Ask a blue-jacketed Friends of the Elephant Seal docent to see and touch a sample of elephant seal.

It’s rough and sometimes described as resembling Astroturf. It’s not soft and silky, like otter or fur seal fur.

Elephant seals rely on their blubber for warmth, not their fur.

Elephant seals spend an average of 32 days on the beach to molt. They arrive and leave individually over the summer months.

Seals are solitary at sea, where it’s every seal for himself.

Navigation

Exactly how elephant seals navigate their migration, as far as 5,000 miles, isn’t known.

Experiments that took seals about 40 miles from their home rookery showed they found their way back in a couple of days.

As they tracked the seals during their dives, the researchers found that even as seals drifted downward, spiraling as many as 20 times, they came to the surface and headed in their original direction.

Since they are underwater most of the time, the seals must be tracking clues they detect underwater. That could include acoustics, geomagnetism and visual clues from the shoreline.

I wonder if the seals look for Davidson Seamount and Morro Rock. What does their underwater world look like to them?