History and present status of the northern elephant seal population

Abstract

The northern elephant seal, Mirounga angustirostris , was presumed extinct by 1892 owing primarily to commercial harvesting for their blubber oil that began in the early 1800s. A small, residual breeding colony survived, however, and with legal protection from further hunting, it grew rapidly through the early 1900s. Immigrants steadily colonized other island and mainland sites in Baja California and California so that by 1991 seals were breeding on fifteen islands and at three mainland beaches. Sixty-four percent of 28,164 northern elephant seal pups born in 1991 were produced on two southern California Channel Islands, San Miguel and San Nicolas. The entire elephant seal population was estimated to number around 127,000 in 1991 and was apparently still increasing by more than 6% annually. The remarkable demographic vitality and sustained population increase of northern elephant seals has evidently been unaffected by the species' low genetic variability and contrasts with recent declines of some populations of the more genetically polymorphic southern elephant seal, M. leonina .