He weighs a tonne. He blocks roads. He has 1.4 million TikTok followers.
And Neil the elephant seal is now a property menace. Local officials in southern Tasmania are pleading for common sense.
The five-year-old male hauled himself ashore in June for his 12th visit to the coast where he was born. He is not small anymore. At 1,000 kilograms, Neil is roughly the weight of a small car.
And he acts like it. Bent traffic bollards.
A crushed sign warning people about seals. A fence he tried to vault and failed. The tally of damaged infrastructure is growing.
Neil spends his days lying placidly wherever he wants — sometimes in the middle of the road. Traffic stops. Towns grind to a halt.
His fame is the real problem. Neil has become a TikTok star with a following larger than Tasmania’s entire human population.
Fans flock to see him. That terrifies officials. “Our biggest concern is that Neil’s popularity could lead to ill-advised human-seal encounters,” officials said.
Those encounters are dangerous for both sides. A 1,000-kilogram seal is not a pet.
It is a wild animal with teeth and temper. Neil has picked fights with parked cars. He has smashed through barriers meant to keep him off roads.
Online, some hail him as an anti-authoritarian hero. A rebel without a cause, but with a lot of blubber. Sophia Volzke, an elephant seal scientist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, sees something else.
Juvenile male elephant seals need to practice for dominance battles. Adult males rear up and crash their chests together, competing for breeding rights.
Neil has no other juveniles to spar with. So he tests himself against whatever he finds. Cars.
Bollards. Fences.
It is normal experimentation for a growing seal, Volzke said. Normal or not, the damage is real. Neil is the only male elephant seal to visit Tasmania in years.
That makes him a rarity. It also makes him a magnet. The bellowing five-year-old comes ashore twice a year after months feeding at sea.
Each visit draws more attention. Each visit leaves more wreckage.
Officials are stuck. They cannot arrest a seal. They cannot reason with him.
They can only ask the public to stay back. Neil does not care about fame.
He does not know he has 1.4 million followers. He lies in the road because it is flat and warm. He bashes cars because they are there.
He is a wild animal doing wild animal things. The humans are the unpredictable part. Some see a celebrity.
Some see a hero. Some see a photo opportunity.
Officials see a disaster waiting to happen. A seal that size can kill a person without meaning to. A person can hurt the seal too, intentionally or not.
So the message is simple. Give Neil space.
Let him finish his shore leave. Let him go back to sea. The bollards can be replaced.
The signs can be reprinted. The fence can be rebuilt. A dead fan or a dead seal cannot.
Neil will keep coming back. That is what he does.
The question is whether his human audience can learn to watch from a distance.
