California’s Elephant Seals Came Back From the Brink, With an Asterisk
Northern elephant seals were hunted down to a few dozen animals. Now hundreds of thousands haul out on California beaches. Here’s how they live, dive and fight, and where to see them.
Updated
A little over a century ago, northern elephant seals were nearly wiped out, hunted for the oil in their blubber. Now there are hundreds of thousands of them, and in winter they pile onto California beaches by the thousands. It’s one of the great comeback stories in conservation, though, as you’ll see, it comes with an asterisk. They’re also ridiculous-looking animals, with those floppy, trunk-like noses, and they are huge. (I’ve visited the beach near San Simeon several times to photograph them.)
You can see them on the California coast year-round, but timing matters. Breeding season runs from December to March, and January through March is the main event, with males fighting and females giving birth. Molting season runs from about April to August. The rest of the year, most of them are out at sea, though a few are usually hanging around.
Their lives split into two extremes: incredibly deep dives at sea, and brutal fights on the beach.
There are two species, northern and southern. The ones lolling on California beaches are northern elephant seals. Adult males can weigh as much as 2,300 kg (around 5,000 lbs) and grow up to 14 feet long. Females are much smaller.
Baby elephant seal. Photo: NOAA
They spend most of the year at sea on two long feeding trips. To fatten up, they dive to impressive depths, typically around 1,700 feet (518 meters) and as deep as 5,015 feet (1,529 meters), sometimes staying down for more than an hour while they hunt squid and fish, and stay away from great white sharks. Very few mammals dive deeper. Only a handful of whales, like sperm whales and beaked whales, beat them.
The mating habits of the California elephant seal are a spectacle, a mix between The Biggest Loser and UFC. In winter, the males show up first and stake out territory. Fights between rival males are like mixed martial arts between extreme heavyweights (ok, I’ll stop). They get intense. The bulls rear up, slam their chests together and bite, using their massive bodies and noses to intimidate. They come away with scars, gashes and sometimes broken bones. The winner gets a harem of females, and the losers wait their turn or go without.
Mating battles between elephant seals can be brutal. Photo: NOAA
It’s not a great life plan. A 2023 study found that the males with the biggest harems, the ones who fought the most, died markedly younger.
A top bull can end up with a harem of up to 50 females. The females arrive pregnant from the year before, give birth on the beach, nurse their pups for about a month and then mate again before heading back to sea. That’s when the beaches fill up with pups, and with the people who come to see them.
Elephant seal near San Simeon, California. Photo: National Park Service
Want to see them? Good spots include Año Nuevo State Park, Point Reyes National Seashore, and Piedras Blancas near San Simeon. Offshore, San Miguel Island and Santa Rosa Island, both part of the Channel Islands National Park, have big rookeries, far from people.
Elephant seal rookery at Piedras Blancas near San Simeon
Even giants get eaten. Great white sharks and orcas are the elephant seal’s main predators. Young seals and females are the easiest targets, but even big bulls aren’t safe. White sharks usually ambush them from below, and orcas hunt in teams to cut seals off. There are some pretty astonishing videos of orcas going after elephant seals.
Elephant seals travel thousands of miles across the Pacific to feed, then come back to the beaches to molt, shedding their fur and the top layer of their skin all at once. It’s not their best look.
Elephant seals on the beach at Piedras Blancas near San Simeon. (Erik Olsen)
Their comeback is remarkable because they came so close to disappearing. In the 1800s, they were hunted almost to extinction for the oil in their blubber. By the 1890s, only a tiny colony survived, on Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, maybe fewer than 100 animals, and by some estimates as few as 25. Then, with protection from hunting in Mexico and the U.S., they started coming back. Today there are somewhere around 225,000 to 250,000 of them. It’s hard to be exact, because an unknown share of them is always at sea.
Here’s the asterisk. Research in 2024, led by the universities of York and Bielefeld in Germany, found that today’s elephant seals still carry “genetic scars” from that bottleneck. Because every elephant seal alive descends from that handful of survivors, they lost a lot of genetic diversity, which could leave them more vulnerable to disease or environmental change down the road. So far, though, they seem healthy.
California has a lot of natural wonders (this magazine covers plenty of them), and elephant seals belong up there with the ancient redwoods, vast deserts, and diverse marine life. They’re proof that if you stop killing something and give it some room, nature can bounce back in a big way. Go see them in January. Bring binoculars, and stay behind the fence.
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