“Neil the seal” is a five-year-old, one-ton, pure chaos southern elephant seal. Rampaging around towns on the Tasmanian coast, Neil has stolen hearts even as he has been spotted overturning road posts, ramming into cars, sleeping in residential areas and blocking traffic. He has a dedicated following of more than 1.5 million social media fans, and it’s easy to see why, says Cara Field, director of conservation medicine at the Marine Mammal Center in California.
“I’m a little bit obsessed with him,” Field says.
To many onlookers, Neil’s shenanigans appear adorably quirky. But to marine biologists like Field, Neil is simply doing what young male elephant seals are meant to do, albeit with flair.
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“Neil the seal is exhibiting some typical behaviors of elephant seals, like returning faithfully to the same place every year,” says Roxanne Beltran, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Beltran and her colleagues’ research shows that elephant seals are expert navigators, relying on a “map sense” to time their sojourns to shore after months of foraging in the deep ocean.
Neil was born in Tasmania in 2020 and has returned to the Australian state several times since. As a relatively dainty pup of about 90 pounds, he was rescued by wildlife officials from a sandbar where he was at risk of downing, said Kris Carlyon, a biologist at the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, at a press conference earlier this month. Local officials believe Neil’s mother may have gotten “caught out” while at sea and was forced to give birth “at the nearest possible land,” he said.
“Some might say that he’s our fault,” Carlyon said, referring to that early rescue effort. “But he was certainly going to drown on that day. And we’ve looked after and managed him ever since.”
Neil is bigger now and more boisterous. Some of his behaviors—smashing into human infrastructure, for instance—are “atypical” for a young elephant seal, Beltran says. But they aren’t a total departure from what biologists would expect of a seal like Neil.
“He does actually seem to be displaying normal juvenile elephant seal behavior,” Field says. Neil won’t be fully grown until he’s about nine or 10 years old. In a colony, young males typically “joust,” or “spar” with each other by bumping chests or chewing on each other—a sort of play fighting before adulthood sets in.
But on Tasmania, Neil is a loner. “Since there are no other seals, he finds other things like cars and posts and cones to express that natural normal behavior,” Field says. It’s good that he’s expressing these behaviors, she adds, although he’s also missing out on the social interaction with his own kind that male seals usually require to one day establish a “harem” of female elephant seals.
For now, Neil has hordes of human fans instead. (For his safety and the public’s, wildlife officials have urged viewers to keep a respectful distance from Neil.)
And Neil’s appearance in Tasmania is a potential bright spot for the species, which is listed as “vulnerable” in Australia. Elephant seals were once common in parts of Tasmania but were “wiped out” by hunters during the early 1800s, Carlyon said at the same press briefing. Globally, the species also faces threats from sea-level rise and stronger storms driven by climate change, as well as from overfishing and avian influenza.
“Neil is potentially one of the first southern elephant seal pups to be born back in Tasmania,” Carlyon said. His return could signify a step toward the recovery of his species. “Regardless of the resource burden and the challenges that Neil throws, we’re pleased to see him.”