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The Daily Bucket - super seals in the Salish Sea [1]
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Date: 2025-03-01
February 26-7, 2025
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
Harbor seals spend a lot of time fishing to fuel their lifestyle as warm-blooded aquatic creatures living in cold water. The more well-fed they are, the more time seals can spend hauled out on shore where they can digest their food, warm up, and sleep. Some even do yoga. And possibly socialize, however silently.
A floating dock is an especially attractive site to be “on shore”. The dock rises and falls with the tide so the water is always nearby but never covers you. Plus, no predators can get to you. While almost always human changes to an environment are detrimental to wildlife and their environment, sometimes they are a benefit, in a very local way. The dock is an example of that.
The dinghy dock is at the end of the elevated headwalk, before the boat slips
I have seen seals sleeping in water, vertically, with their noses pointed skyward, but mostly in summer. Seals save energy by hauling out on shore. Yes, they have a thick layer of fat and dense fur but immersion in 48°F seawater will extract warmth even from them. Humans, lesser creatures, are unlikely to survive more than an hour immersed in these waters.
According to research studies (assembled in Harbor seal species profile, Encyclopedia of Puget Sound), the seals in my local bay are in some ways typical but in others unusual.
Harbor seals manifested a haul-out site fidelity of 75% (Suryan and Harvey. 1998) Individuals devoted between 11% and 27% of their time on haul-outs, the duration of which lasted on average 4.77 hours, with a maximum haul-out of a lengthy 24.6 hours (Cunningham et al. 2009).
Friendly Seal and the two Little White Seals definitely have strong site fidelity, specifically to the dinghy dock. But they also haul out for considerably longer than most harbor seals. I’d guess that these seals must be very well-fed based on my trail cam footage from the past few days.
Here’s what the trailcam data show:
On February 26, Little White Seal #1 emerged onto the dock at around 11am.
She spent the next couple of hours engaged in an active yoga session.
37 sec of video clips:
At around 1pm, Friendly Seal joined her on the dock. Unfortunately the positioning of the camera did not give a good view of her, out of frame to the left.
FS and LWS#1
Friendly Seal and LWS#1 lounged on the dock continuously until about 9pm when LWS#2 took up its station on the corner of the dock.
All three seals stayed there overnight. Occasionally all three were sleeping but most of the time one or another or all three were moving around, so the trailcam sd card nearly filled up. Thousands of photos and videos.
At around 5:30am the next day, just before light, Friendly Seal jumped off the dock, leaving the two LWSs together.
37 sec of video clips:
(The audio is Chorus frogs in the wetland behind the bay)
LWS#1 and LWS#2
At 10:30am, LWS#2 jumped off, leaving LWS#1 alone again for about 15 minutes, at which time she went off to fish too.
(Note how much lighter her fur is compared to when she first got out of the water the day before. Dry.)
33 sec of video clips from Feb 27:
LWS#2 jumps off
From the time stamps on the photos and videos, we can conclude that during this interval,
LWS#2 was hauled out for 13½ hours
Friendly Seal was hauled out for 16½ hours
LWS#1 was hauled out for an astonishing 23 hours 45 minutes.
All of them were lounging on the dock far more than the average of 5 hours from the study referenced above. And that’s at a minimum. I have no way of knowing whether Friendly Seal or LWS#2 were hauled out on some other part of the dock, or elsewhere.
Super seals indeed!
🐟
Mostly sunny and calm in the PNW islands today. Quite foggy, with foghorn sounding. Daytime temps in the low 50s, nighttime mid 40s.
What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?
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