Neil the elephant seal left Tasmania this week without so much as a wave of his flipper. He had just spent June in Hobart, rocking a van in a parking lot and trailing a local woman down the beach.
“It’s like this giant slug coming at you,” said Rebecca Thomson, who lives in Hobart and rushed to see him when she heard he was back. She kept a safe distance. “It was really exciting and intriguing, and yes, definitely a bit intimidating, too.”
Neil weighs about 2,200 pounds. Videos show him blocking roads, slamming into street signposts, peering through residents’ screen doors and flattening traffic cones. He hasn’t threatened anyone so far. A TikTok fan page for him has more than 1.7 million followers, and he has a theme song.
A seal born in the wrong place
Neil was born in 2020 off the southeast coast of Tasmania, near Hobart. That is unusual. Most southern elephant seals in the region are born on uninhabited Macquarie Island, about 932 miles south, and go back there to breed, said Clive McMahon, a research ecologist at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. His mother may have been young and inexperienced and failed to get back in time. “Neil is doing exactly what we would expect a good elephant seal to do,” McMahon said. “It just happens to be that he’s doing his normal behavior in a strange place.”
Scientists know of only a handful of southern elephant seals born in Tasmania and surviving in the past four decades, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment (NRE Tas). The seals are legally protected as a vulnerable species.
Between April and August, elephant seals gather for a mid-year haul-out that scientists still don’t fully understand. Young males spar, learning behavior for the day they compete for females. Hobart has no other young males. “So poor old Neil is making do with all the other things that he’s ‘playing’ with, so big bollards, the traffic cones, potentially cars,” McMahon said.
Crowds and danger
Thousands of people turned up in June despite repeated calls to keep away, NRE Tas wildlife biologist Sam Thalmann told ABC Radio. The department warned that “even small movements from a large wild animal can cause serious injury.” Adult males can reach 8,000 pounds and 16 feet long. NRE Tas set up a 24-hour security detail for Neil while he was ashore, according to ABC.
Thalmann pointed to Freya, the walrus that went viral in 2022 for sunbathing on small boats in the Oslo Fjord. Norwegian authorities euthanized her after judging her a danger to people who crowded her for photos. NRE Tas does not plan that for Neil, Thalmann said, but the public has to cooperate. More than 60,000 people signed a petition for a non-lethal management plan with restricted access zones.
Neil’s best-case future is a trip to Macquarie Island and a chance to breed. But he doesn’t know where the colony is, and tracking data show he has never gone that far south. More likely he will spend his life alone on Tasmanian shores, looking for a mate. “The infrastructure that we built isn’t designed to withstand a 1,000-kilogram animal bashing into it,” McMahon said. “We’re going to have to rethink some stuff.”
