July 12, 2024. With the 2024 Summer Olympic Games fast approaching, it’s a perfect time to shine a light on three world class elephant seal athletes, whose long-distance migration in Summer 2023 caught our attention. Their individual stories are displayed in a new exhibit in the Elephant Seal Visitor Center in San Simeon, California.
In late Spring 2023, three adult female northern elephant seals, each carrying satellite tags, set out on their 7+ month post-molt migration. Each had given birth to a pup several months earlier and had returned to their home beach at Año Nuevo Reserve for the spring molt.
They each departed in June 2023, on solo foraging expeditions into the deep waters of the Pacific. By early September, 2023, this trio of exceptional seals gained our attention after crossing the international dateline, and continuing west, each over 3200 miles from their central California home base, near Santa Cruz, California!
We watched with anticipation as each of these elephant seals returned to the rookery for the 2024 winter birthing and breeding season, following their epic swims. Two of the three were pregnant at the time and gave birth to pups!
We honor and celebrate these three female elephant seals for their athleticism and incredible accomplishments. Their awesome journeys deserve the attention we hope they will gain by telling their stories.
We have nick-named them after some of the all-time most accomplished human (female) long-distance swimmers, Diana Nyad, Gertrude Ederle and Katie Ledecky.
The “World Class Elephant Seal Athletes” exhibit is on display daily from 10 AM-4 PM in the Elephant Seal Visitor Center at 250 San Simeon Ave, Suite 5A, San Simeon, CA (in the Cavalier complex.) After-hours visitors can also view the exhibit through the Center’s south windows.
If you’d like to track an elephant seal in real-time, the Fahlo “Glide” elephant seal tracking bracelet is now available for purchase in the Elephant Seal Visitor Center.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Roxanne Beltran, Ph.D., Patrick Robinson, Ph.D., Florencia Vilches, Doctoral candidate, and the Beltran Lab research team at University of California, Santa Cruz for sharing the stories of these incredible seals. All scientific data was collected under NMFS 23188.
The exhibit was curated by Kathleen Curtis, Ph.D., Friends of the Elephant Seal Board Liaison for Community Science and Research, in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz research team. Heather Barbis, HB Design805, created the final design for the exhibit.