When Neil was a pup of about 90 pounds, Tasmanian wildlife officials pulled him off a sandbar where he was in danger of drowning. Kris Carlyon, a biologist with the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, told a press conference that his mother was probably “caught out” at sea and had to give birth “at the nearest possible land.”
“Some might say that he’s our fault,” Carlyon said. “But he was certainly going to drown on that day. And we’ve looked after and managed him ever since.”
Neil was born in 2020. He is now five, weighs about a ton and has more than 1.5 million social media followers. He has knocked over road posts, rammed cars, slept in residential areas and held up traffic along the Tasmanian coast.
Normal behaviour, odd setting
Cara Field, director of conservation medicine at the Marine Mammal Center in California, says she is “a little bit obsessed with him.” But to her, Neil is simply doing what young male elephant seals do. “He does actually seem to be displaying normal juvenile elephant seal behavior,” she said.
In a colony, young males joust. They bump chests and chew on each other, a kind of play fighting before adulthood. Neil has no colony. “Since there are no other seals, he finds other things like cars and posts and cones to express that natural normal behavior,” Field said. He is also missing the contact with other males that seals usually need if they are ever to gather a harem of females.
Roxanne Beltran, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said his habit of returning faithfully to the same place each year is typical. Her research shows elephant seals navigate with a “map sense”, timing trips ashore after months foraging in the deep ocean. Smashing into human property is another matter. She called that “atypical,” though not a total departure from what biologists would expect.
Neil will not be fully grown until he is about nine or 10. Wildlife officials have asked people to keep a respectful distance, for his safety and theirs.
A species coming back
Elephant seals were once common in parts of Tasmania before hunters “wiped out” the local animals in the early 1800s, Carlyon said. The species is listed as vulnerable in Australia. Globally it faces sea-level rise, stronger storms driven by climate change, overfishing and avian influenza.
“Neil is potentially one of the first southern elephant seal pups to be born back in Tasmania,” Carlyon said. “Regardless of the resource burden and the challenges that Neil throws, we’re pleased to see him.”
