First baby elephant seal born at Race Rocks

By Sarah Petrescu, Times ColonistJanuary 31, 2009


A baby elephant seal, with its mother, born at the Race Rocks provincial ecological reserve Friday.

A baby elephant seal, with its mother, born at the Race Rocks provincial ecological reserve Friday.
Photograph by: Ryan J. Murphy/Pearson College, Canwest News Service

A baby elephant seal born at Race Rocks a few nights ago is the ecological reserve’s first, and might be the most northerly birth of the mammal recorded, say the area’s guardians.

“This area has long been a place where elephant seals come but we’ve never seen anything like this,” said Garry Fletcher, a volunteer warden who also manages racerocks.com. “The babies are usually born in Baja, California, not this far north.”

Fletcher has been involved with the provincial reserve since the mid-1970s as an instructor with Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific, which uses the park as a teaching site.

“They started showing up on the rocks in the ’80s for a month or two. Now there are seals here almost year-round,” he said, adding animal populations often fluctuate for no clear reason.

Ryan Murphy, the resident marine biologist at Race Rocks, was the first to spot the baby seal Friday morning near the island’s helicopter pad.

“I was going to check on an adult female to see if her scarring was from an entanglement when I saw another adult female with a young male that had been following her around. Beside them was this tiny pup that must’ve been born sometime the night before,” said Murphy, 26, who started his work at the site eight weeks ago. He’s kept a close watch on the newborn seal since. “This morning it had milk around its mouth, which is a good sign that he’s feeding ... The pup was the size of a small dog when he was born and now he’s as big as a harbour seal.”

The unusual birth is the latest indication of increased elephant seal activity on the Island.

“We are definitely getting more seals spotted around here moulting,” said Fletcher, referring to the process in which elephant seals shed their skin and hair and grow a new layer. “But it’s usually around June.”

Earlier this month, a young elephant seal caused a commotion in an upscale Oak Bay neighbourhood when it settled in a roadside ditch to moult, returning to the ocean a few days later.

In November of last year, the body of an enormous male elephant seal washed up on a Nanaimo beach. Biologists were doubly mystified by what killed the seal — weighing 2,700 kilograms and 4.1 metres long — and why it was there. The species had never been spotted in the Straight of Georgia before. Blunt force was ruled the likely cause of the animal’s death, possibly due to a run-in with a boat or whale.

spetrescu@tc.canwest.com
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