Source : the age
Like many adolescents with an outsized social media presence and a distinct lack of constructive peer support, Neil the seal is exhibiting performative behaviour that is causing serious concern to those charged with his care and supervision.
Neil is the five-year-old elephant seal born in southern Tasmania who still hauls himself ashore at or near his birthplace twice a year – once in October to malt, and once mid-year during mating season.
In his early visits ashore as a playful pup of just half a ton or so, Neil spent time wrestling traffic cones or sprawling out across driveways or pavements, attracting a substantial global audience to social media posts about his shore visits.
Today, at the age of five, Neil weighs about 1000 kilograms and recent footage shows him demolishing a line of bollards that had been concreted into the ground and bothering a parked Toyota Land Cruiser.
Dr Jane Younger, a specialist in elephant seal behaviour from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, says it is likely that Neil was poorly brought up after being born on the Tasman Peninsula, perhaps to an inexperienced young mother.
Elephant seals, intensely social animals, typically breed in large island colonies. Younger believes Neil’s mother might have been a stray from Macquarie Island. But having been born among the towns and villages of the Tasman Peninsula, Neil, displaying typical seal “site fidelity” will keep returning through his life, says Younger.
His boisterous behaviour is typical of an adolescent seal. In the community of a seal colony young males are “quite wrestly”, says Younger.
“So Neil, if he was living in a normal elephant seal colony … he would have other elephant seals to interact with. They kind of play fight and lie on top of each other in big piles.
“They kind of rear up a little bit and then smack into each other with their chest, and then they bite each other a little bit.”
With no other seals to play with in suburban Tasmania, Neil is making do. So far, says Younger, local communities are either enjoying his visits or, at the very least, putting up with the biannual disruption.
Younger fears this might change when he reaches sexual maturity, and though hesitant to ascribe human emotions to a large aquatic mammal, she does fear that Neil might be lonely in his isolation. She worries that having been raised outside a colony, the seal will never find a mate.
“In a couple of years, he’ll be of mating age, and his behaviour might change a little bit,” she says. “He could become slightly more aggressive once he gets to about eight years old.”
By the time his reaches full maturity, Neil could weigh up to four tonnes, far more than the Land Cruiser he was recently filmed harassing.
At present, Neil’s hooliganism is curbed by staff of the Tasmanian government’s Marine Conservation Program, who keep an eye him during his shore excursions. A recent minor controversy about one of these officers using a stick to prod him off the road – Neil’s sunbathing blocks traffic – was well intentioned but misplaced, says Younger.
Scientists in the field often use tactics like this to move the animals, and the process has been ethically tested.
“They all love seals, they all love Neil. No one’s trying to hurt Neil; it’s just about protecting themselves,” says Younger, pointing out that he was already largely enough to inadvertently kill a person.
In a few weeks, Neil will return to the sea, where over the coming months he will range across thousands of kilometres of ocean and reach depths of up to 2000 metres in his hunting and exploring, and growing.
Until he returns in spring.
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Nick O’Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.Connect via email.
