Elephant Seals: “Unprecedented” Research Captures Their Journey
Scientists and graduate students from the University of California Santa Cruz have completed an exhaustive study of the elephant seal by tracking 300 individuals. The study was published on May 15th in the journal PLoS ONE.
Researchers tagged elephant seals in order to track them as they journeyed throughout the entire northeast Pacific Ocean to find food. Elephant seals prey on other marine animals such as fish or squid.
In the study, the UC Santa Cruz researchers found that, although elephant seals use a variety of strategies to find food, their foremost strategy utilizes gyres—or the boundary zone between two rotating ocean currents.
Researchers also monitored the health and birthrate of the elephant seals.
Read more about the study in the ScienceDaily article.
