Why “Neil the Seal” is causing chaos in Tasmania

“Neil the Seal” is pure five-year-old, one-ton Southern mayhem. elephant seal. Ramming through the towns of Tasmania’s coast, Neil stole hearts even as he was. spotted toppling road poles, crashing into cars, sleeping in residential areas and blocking traffic. He has a dedicated follow-up of more than 1.5 million fans on social media, and it’s easy to see why, says Cara Field, director of conservation medicine at the Marine Mammal Center in California.

“I’m kind of obsessed with him,” Field says.

To many viewers, Neil’s shenanigans seem adorably off-kilter. But to marine biologists like Field, Neil is simply doing what young male elephant seals are supposed to do, albeit brilliantly.

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“Neil the seal exhibits typical elephant seal behaviors, such as returning faithfully to the same place every year,” says Roxanne Beltran, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Beltran and colleagues’ research shows that elephant seals are expert navigators, relying on a “meaning of the map» to time their stays on land after months of searching for food in the depths of the ocean.

Neil was born in Tasmania in 2020 and has returned to the Australian state several times since. As a relatively delicate puppy weighing about 90 pounds, he was rescued by wildlife officials from a sandbar where he was in danger of falling, Kris Carlyon, a biologist with Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, said during a press conference earlier this month. Local authorities believe Neil’s mother may have been “surprised” while at sea and was forced to give birth “on the nearest land possible”, he said.

“Some might say it’s our fault,” Carlyon said, referring to those early rescue efforts. “But he was definitely going to drown that day. And we’ve been treating him and managing him ever since.”

Neil is bigger now and louder. Some of its behaviors – crushing human infrastructure, for example – are “atypical” for a young elephant seal, Beltran says. But they’re not a complete departure from what biologists would expect from a seal like Neil.

“It actually appears to be displaying normal juvenile elephant seal behavior,” Field says. Neil will not be fully grown until he is nine or ten years old. In a colony, young males typically “joust” or “face off” by chest-bumping or nipping each other – a sort of fighting game before adulthood takes hold.

But in Tasmania, Neil is a loner. “Since there are no other seals, it finds other things like cars, poles and cones to express this natural and normal behavior,” Field explains. It’s good that he’s expressing these behaviors, she adds, although he also lacks the social interaction with his own kind that male seals usually need to one day establish a “harem” of female elephant seals.

For now, Neil has more of a horde of human fans. (For his and the public’s safety, wildlife officials urged viewers to keep a close eye. respectful distance by Neil.)

And Neil’s appearance in Tasmania is a potential positive for the species, which is listed as “vulnerable” in Australia. Elephant seals were once common in parts of Tasmania but were “wiped out” by hunters in the early 1800s, Carlyon told the same media briefing. Globally, the species is also threatened by sea ​​level rise and stronger storms led by climate change, as well as overfishing and bird flu.

“Neil is potentially one of the first southern elephant seal pups to be born in Tasmania,” Carlyon said. His return could mean a step towards the recovery of his species. “Regardless of the resource burden and challenges Neil throws at us, we are happy to see him.”