I received this email from the ecoguardian about interesting elephant seal beahviour:

A few weeks ago we saw a E-seal pup from Ano Nuevo (see the pictures attached). When it encountered some difficulty in getting off our docks, one of the larger E-seals was behaving very motherly. It was quite panicked and monitoring the pup closely swimming from one side of the dock to the other, reaching up to see it. In the photo I’ve attached you can see her peering up to see the pup, which she was doing over and over again. I have since seen these two around together in the water as well.

The research says that mothers are only with pups for 4 weeks – so I’m intrigued by this behaviour as this pup must be about 9 months old or so…maybe some mothers stay around for longer? Or there is other behaviour that I’m not aware of……