A puddle ringed by bollards. That was the thing Neil wanted to fight this week, according to Kris Carlyon, who watches over wildlife health for Tasmania’s natural resources department. “He’s got no other seals to play with, to joust with, to test his own strength with like he would be doing normally,” Carlyon said. So the seal picks whatever is lying around.
Neil is a southern elephant seal, five years old and about 1,000kg, and he has spent the past few weeks flopping through towns in the south of the state. Fences have gone down. Cones and barricades get ignored. He has leaned on parked LandCruisers, slept in the road and held up traffic.
A seal without a colony
Young male elephant seals normally learn their trade among other young males. They shove, bite and test their chests against each other, and the practice builds the strength they need later to compete for mates and territory. Cara Field of California’s Marine Mammal Center, where she leads conservation medicine, told Scientific American that Neil “does actually seem to be displaying normal juvenile elephant seal behavior.” The difference is the audience. “Since there are no other seals, he finds other things like cars and posts and cones to express that natural normal behavior,” she said.
Ecologist Roxanne Beltran, of UC Santa Cruz, noted that his loyalty to one spot is typical too. Elephant seals navigate with a kind of map sense and return to the same shore year after year. Smashing into human infrastructure is the part she called atypical.
How he got here is a story of its own. Neil was born near Hobart in October 2020, most likely because his mother was caught out at sea and came ashore at the nearest land. Carlyon said wildlife staff pulled the pup, then about 90 pounds, off a sandbar where he would have drowned. Most of his kind live far to the south on Macquarie and Heard islands, thousands of kilometres away, and elephant seal specialist Dr Clive McMahon told the Guardian that Neil considers Tasmania home “because he doesn’t know where Macquarie Island is.” He has come back 12 times. On land he stays about six weeks after feeding in the Southern Ocean.
Too much love
Neil has more than 1.5 million followers online, and the crowds turn up wherever he hauls out. Carlyon does not hide his unease. “Right now the attention Neil gets helps with the awareness of our threatened species, helps with his protection in some ways,” he said. “But it also encourages perhaps risky human behaviour.”
Some of that behaviour is alarming. Carlyon said people had carried small babies up close to the animal for a photo. Others have tried to leave him meals, though Neil does not need feeding and will not eat what they offer. Dr Jane Younger, a seal expert at the University of Tasmania, was blunt: “He’s already at a size now where he’s dangerous. Even if he’s not in an aggressive mood, he could easily kill a person.”
The rules are simple. Stay at least 20 metres away, and 50 metres if you have a dog. Never step between Neil and the water. Officials point to Freya, the walrus in Norway who was euthanised in 2022 after crowds kept approaching her, and they say relocating Neil is a risky last resort.
The species is listed as vulnerable in Australia, and hunters wiped elephant seals out of Tasmania in the early 1800s. Carlyon said Neil may be among the first of his species born in Tasmania again. He could grow to 3,500kg. “Regardless of the resource burden and the challenges that Neil throws, we’re pleased to see him,” Carlyon said.
Sources
- Tasmanians warned of loving Neil to death as 1,000kg seal's antics feed double-edged sword of fame (Guardian)
- Why Neil the seal is unleashing chaos in Tasmania (Scientific American)
- Neil the seal wreaks havoc as experts warn of loving him to death (7NEWS)
