Watch two 4-ton elephant seals slam into each other over 150 females

A battle cry rings out across the Antarctic Islands. These are the titans of the Southern Ocean, four tons of raw sexual aggression, battling for the beach. Southern Elephant Seal males fight for dominance and to protect their hard-won harems, which can consist of 150 females or more. Ranks between dominant males and challengers can be long, bloody, and extremely violent, with the loser often suffering serious injury or even death. But the rewards can be great. The highest-ranking males may father up to 500 pups in their lifetime. But the journey to becoming a so-called Beachmaster is fraught with difficulty, because these behemoths don't start their lives being so formidable. Life is hard for the youngest elephant seals, and sometimes they take an unusual path. In October 2020, researchers came across a baby southern elephant seal in Salem Bay in Tasmania — an extraordinarily rare occurrence ever since humans decimated their population there from hunting. Today, the closest breeding colony to Tasmania is some 1,500 kilometers away, close to Antarctica. The pup they discovered was just one of five pups known to have been successfully weaned on Tasmania in the last 40 years. The pup eventually grew up and swam off into the ocean, and researchers thought that might be the last they see of him. But southern elephant seals have a strong attachment to the area where they were born, and once a year, they come ashore. And so in July 2021, the rare young seal reappeared, and this time he was ready for chaos. Meet Neil the Seal, a lovable doofus known for getting into fights with orange traffic cones, barring people's access to their cars, and trying to break into garages. Neil, don't even think about it. He's gone from a wide-eyed pup to a large juvenile, and the growing has only just begun. Scientists from the Marine Conservation Program decided to relocate him away from this highly populated area, but that didn't stop Neil from returning to more human habitats in in 2022, and 2023, and 2024. You can't keep doing this. Neil, you need to be quiet. You've had me up since 3 o'clock. You broke the garage again. And this could become a problem for the humans in contact with Neil. Oh, you big tub of lard. Because you really do not want to cross the path of a fully grown male southern elephant seal. Despite looking like clumsy blobs of jello, southern elephant seals are anything but. They are absolutely enormous, crushing machines. And they're super-adapted diving machines, diving deeper than almost any other mammal on Earth. And being a male often means being a valiant warrior, engaging in those brutal fights for dominance. Some of their anatomical features are truly bizarre, from their enormous proboscis from which they got their name, to the total shedding of their fur and skin every year. And their social system and breeding lives are among the most extreme and most brutal in the animal kingdom. For now, Neil seems determined to hang out with the humans. But if Neil manages to make it to adulthood, he might just end up being a beach master, siring hundreds of pups. But he's got a long road ahead of him, with plenty of obstacles. They are open ocean predators, who spend most of their time at sea. When they're not mating or molting, they have to be constantly hunting in order to pack on the pounds. They can eat anywhere from 4.8 to 16 kilograms of fish and squid per day. But to get so large, these seals hunt for the biggest fish and squid they can find. And these types of large fish are not readily available in shallow water. They have to go deeper than almost any other animal to find them. Elephant seals are the deepest diving seals, and some of the deepest diving mammals, period. They've been recorded going as deep as 2,388 meters down, and staying submerged for 2 hours. For comparison, this is about the same as a sperm whale, and comes second only to the Cuvier's beaked whale, the mammal that's thought to be the world's deepest diver. Male and female elephant seals have quite different life experiences, starting from From the time they're juveniles all the way through adulthood. It takes female seals 3-4 years to reach sexual maturity, at which point they can begin breeding. It takes 5-6 years for males to reach sexual maturity, but their social maturity comes much later. They're not likely to start breeding until they're 10, almost halfway through their life. And even then, most males are unlikely to be successful at reproducing. African elephant seals are the most sexually dimorphic of any mammal species, meaning they have the greatest size difference between males and females. Males continue growing throughout their lives, and they tend to forage in different habitats than females, where there's a higher risk of predation by orcas and sleeper sharks, but also more food. And the males need to take that risk, because they must get as big as possible. Only the very largest and most aggressive males become Beachmasters, the enormous alpha males who can have a harem of hundreds of female seals. The mating season starts with the males coming ashore first, usually returning to the place they were born. Depending on which mating colony they belong to, they haul out around August or September and begin fighting for territory. Loud roars begin to permeate the beaches, enabled by the males' proboscis. That's the weird-looking growth on their face, unique just to the males. And it's something that's been commented on by scientists for more than a hundred years, going all the way back to Charles Darwin, who described it as an appendage that becomes greatly elongated during the breeding season and can then be erected. In this state, it's sometimes a foot in length. As Darwin noted, the proboscis gets larger during the mating season for several specific reasons. First, it helps provide a visual signifier. I'm big, don't mess with me. But it also contributes to the seal's vocalizations. Before the males ever think about engaging in physical confrontations, they roar at each other. Most of the fights end before either seal is injured severely enough to cause death, but rarely the fight will be violent enough to kill one of the males. And if they don't die, the losers can either wander over to another part of the beach and look for someone else to challenge, or they can give up. That seems to be what happens for the vast majority of males, because only about 1% are responsible for 85-90% of all successful inseminations. Then, once the males have secured their territory, they wait for the females to haul out. But the mating doesn't start right away. First the females give birth to the pups they've been gestating since the last mating season. Then they feed milk to their new pup for about 24 days. It's only after all of this has happened that the males start mating with the females they've defended. They can be aggressive and over-eager with the females, and sometimes this results in pups getting crushed. For the more than two months that males are on shore, and just over a month that females are there, neither eat anything. Only the new pups are gaining weight. All adults are losing weight at a remarkable pace. For the males, they end up losing about 40% of their body mass, or 12 kg every day. The females lose about 35% of their body mass. This might sound surprising, because the females are the ones feeding the new pup. But remember that males spend about a month longer on shore, not eating, while they wait for the females to arrive. As soon as the breeding season is over, the adults get back into the water, ready for food, while the young are on their own to figure out hunting and staying alive. But this foraging period is a short one, because there's one more haul-out for the adults and juveniles alike, and this time, it's for the catastrophic molt. The seals lose both their fur and the upper layer of their skin. On the simplest level, molting is when animals shed their skin, fur, or feathers. This can happen due to changing seasons, like when cats shed their winter fur in the spring. Or it can be because the animals are growing larger, as with snakes and lizards who shed all the skin from their body at once. Even humans have a less dramatic version of this. We shed skin cells all the time, as old pieces of the epidermis are replaced by new ones. Going back to the elephant seals, their epidermis has three layers. It's this top layer of cornified epidermis that the seals lose, along with their fur. And shedding it is such an energetically costly process that the seal's metabolism ramps up two or three times its normal rate. Pretty inconvenient, since they're stuck on land and away from food when it happens. But elephant seals aren't shedding their skin to emerge in a bigger body like snakes do, and so shedding all that skin at once seems extreme. So why do they do it, and why do they have to undergo this process once a year, every year? It's because of their watery lifestyle. During the rest of the year, while they're hunting in the water, blood is moved away from their skin to provide oxygen to their organs and keep the rest of their body warm. In order to have the necessary blood flow to their skin to trigger a molt, they have to be on land, away from the cold water. So instead of flaking off bits of skin all the time, the way humans do, the seals shed everything in one go, on land, when they won't freeze to death doing so. It's also thought that the catastrophic molt in southern elephant seals could help them get rid of contaminants that build up in their bodies, like mercury from the fish they eat. Which is a pretty cool trick, if that's how it works. But the molt seems to be an all-around uncomfortable process. The seals have a harder time with thermoregulation, sometimes getting too hot and slipping into the water to cool off, but sometimes getting too cold and needing to huddle together in large congregations to share body heat. Whether Neil will become one of the beachmasters who gets to mate with dozens or hundreds of females remains to be seen. When it comes to courtship, we can't all be so lucky as to look like this. And beating up all the other competitors for partners is generally frowned upon in our society.