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Story time PORTS program LIVE from MacKerricher State Park!

Learn how a small snail makes a big difference, and how we can make a big difference in the lives of ocean animals!

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WORLD OCEAN WEEK: "The Snail and the Whale" Story Time!

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Harbor Seal Adaptations PORTS Program!

Meet Interpreter Kat and learn why she loves harbor seals so much!

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WORLD OCEAN WEEK: Harbor Seals & Marine Mammal Adaptations!

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The ocean is a big place, and it can feel daunting to fix big problems. Don't forget, every bit of help counts. Here's some easy tid-bits we can do every day to help our marine mammals!

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A Word with Dr. Whizzlepuff: Climate Change

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WARNING: This video contains scenes of adorable.

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How does climate change affect marine mammals?

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How does climate change affect marine mammals?

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Warming waters, increasingly acidic ocean waters, and growing amounts of litter threaten our marine mammals! Here's how:

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The deep blue waters and crashing waves along the coast of California provide a picturesque backdrop to the state's shores, but the sight has been marred of late.

As winter rains have poured down, trash has flowed onto area beaches. And amid the detritus has been an even more troubling discovery: scores of sickened or dead marine mammals.

Worse yet, the sick animals seem to be concentrated locally.

While Northern California and San Diego County have seen dozens of stranded sea lion pups, rescuers say the numbers are normal for this time of year for their areas.

But Orange County beaches have been inundated with sick seals, sea lions and other marine mammals, as well as dead dolphins.

Rescues of unhealthy marine mammals have nearly tripled for this time of year in Orange County, according to the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which this week took in its 41st animal since the year began. The number of sick marine mammals becoming stranded in L.A. County beaches is slightly higher than usual, with 44 being cared for by the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles, said veterinarian Lauren Palmer.

"It's been a little bit of a whirlwind," said Krysta Higuchi, a spokeswoman for the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach. "We're going through fish, funds and medical supplies faster than we expected. It is a strain on all of us here."

The center says it's normal for the number of stranded animals to go up near the end of March, but this year the organization has rescued three elephant seals and a large number of sea lions much earlier than usual, and most are 8-month-old pups.

Sea lion pups are typically beached either because their mothers are unhealthy and cannot properly feed them, or they were strong enough to wean early and then are unable to find food on their own, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The rescued pups have been dry, malnourished and emaciated, weighing half as much as they should, the center said.

Though the exact reason for the increase in the number of strandings this year is unknown, Higuchi said it could be tied to warmer ocean waters caused by an El Niño weather pattern or excess stormwater runoff from this winter's rains.

After months of flirting, conditions for El Niño came together in the central Pacific in mid-February, but forecasters say the pattern is weak.

For an El Niño to be declared, a certain atmospheric circulation pattern has to form over warm ocean-surface temperatures. The ocean temperatures have been elevated for months, but the circulation pattern hadn't caught on until last month, said Michelle L'Heureux, a meteorologist with the National Weather Services' Climate Prediction Center.

Warm waters often reduce the amount of bait fish in the ocean, such as sardines and anchovies, which larger marine mammals eat. The smaller forage fish tend to swim in cold water, so during an El Niño event the fish may be diving deeper or farther out than usual - out of the reach of young sea lions, said Melin, who studies the overall population of sea lions in the state.

She recently returned from a trip to the Channel Islands and found a strong population of healthy sea lion mothers, which seems to indicate the newly weaned pups aren't finding enough food, leading to their strandings.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In addition to the higher-than-normal pinniped rescues, researchers are seeing an increase in the number of stranded dolphins.

The Pacific Marine Mammal Center recently enlisted the help of NOAA and several universities to help determine why so many dolphins have washed up along the state's beaches.

Last month, 20 dead dolphins were found along the California coast, a much higher number than experts have seen compared with previous years, said Justin Viezbicke, a stranding coordinator with NOAA. That's higher than the total number of dead dolphins found statewide in 2017 and 2018 combined.

In Orange County, 10 dolphins have been found dead or dying since the beginning of the year - four in the last week. In Los Angeles County, two dying dolphins were found stranded on beaches, a "very unusual" count for the area so early in the year, according to the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles.

Reports of the stranded dolphins and sea lion rescues have come as the state is experiencing an unusually wet year, with consecutive storms washing trash and toxins into the ocean.

Necropsy results have yet to come in, but Viezbicke thinks the dolphin beachings have something to do with this year's rain, which has pounded the state in recent months with a series of atmospheric river-fueled fronts.

It's possible the storm runoff that washes waste into the ocean has caused a stronger bloom of poisonous algae, which produce a toxin responsible for neurological disorders, Higuchi said. Sickness caused by the algae blooms can cause seizures, which affected three of the dolphins found recently in Southern California.

"They were flailing around" when rescuers arrived, Higuchi said. "It was a very heartbreaking experience. These dolphins are such majestic creatures. To see them suffering was very difficult."

Whale-watching groups have reported an unusually high number of dolphins along the coast this season. Rather than any unusual illnesses, it's possible onshore winds and waves from strong storms could be washing the carcasses ashore, making the dead animals more visible, Viezbicke said.

But as to why there are so many stranded sea lions this winter, the answers are less clear.

"It's getting hard to give good answers because the ocean is getting more unpredictable," said Douglas McCauley, a professor of marine biology at UC Santa Barbara. "The ocean is just getting weirder. So much is changing" in terms of climate.

Although the El Niño conditions are weak, McCauley says the weather pattern may be throwing the ocean temperatures off just enough to affect marine life.

The Orange and Los Angeles county coasts tend to see stranded sea lion pups sooner than other parts of California because the animals breed at the nearby Channel Islands, Melin said.

During the same two-month span in 2018, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center rescued 15 animals, compared with 41 from this year, said Peter Chang, the center's chief executive. In 2017, the group had rescued 18 pinnipeds by this time of the year.

The Sausalito-based Marine Mammal Center - a separate entity from the Pacific Marine Mammal Center that rescues animals on 600 miles of beaches between Mendocino and San Luis Obispo counties - has not seen an uptick in rescues this winter, spokesman Giancarlo Rulli said. The organization is currently housing 18 marine mammals, a normal number for this time of year, he said.

"There's been nothing out of the ordinary, but things could change," Rulli said. "That could mean something could head up the coast. We're keeping a close eye on things."

To the south, SeaWorld in San Diego has also seen an average number of rescues, with a total of 45 sea lions, spokesman David Koontz said.

The last time California had a major increase in stranded sea lions was between 2013 and 2016, when a strong El Niño caused what experts called an "unusual mortality event."

In 2015, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center rescued nearly 600 animals, while the Marine Mammal Center in Northern California rescued 1,800.

After 2016, the sea lion population began to recover, but Melin said she expects there will be more large mortality events, given the changing climate.

Though El Niño leads to temporary shifts in marine mammals' movements and population, general ocean warming is causing more permanent damage to all sorts of sea creatures.

In February, UC Santa Barbara researchers found an elusive hoodwinker sunfish that had washed ashore in Goleta, far from its usual home in the waters of Australia and New Zealand. Last week, a dead humpback whale ended up in Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon River.

"The waters we've seen in the last decade are probably what we'll be seeing in the future," Melin said. "It will be more common for large stranding events. We've seen it coming, really."
alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com Twitter: @r_valejandra

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Must Reads: Sick marine mammals turning up on California beaches in droves

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As record rains have poured down on California's coasts, sending thousands of gallons of runoff into the oceans and dumping debris and trash onto the beaches, dozens of sickened marine mammals have been turning up along the state's shores this winter.

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These whales migrate along the west coast twice a year. Click to meet our twice-a-year special guests and learn about why they migrate!

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Gray Whales: Born to Migrate- Pt. 1 (Short Documentary)

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Marine Mammals in their Natural Habitat!

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Marine Mammals in their Natural Habitat!

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Check out these amazing animals in their natural habitat!

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Did you know whales used to live on land and even had legs?! Watch this video to learn more!

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Check out this fossil of an ancient ancestor to the seal!

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Seals and sea-lions gracefully careen through today's oceans with the help of legs that have become wide, flat flippers. But it was not always this way. Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for. Now, a beautifully new fossil called Puijila illustrates just what such early steps in seal evolution looked like. With four legs and a long tail, it must have resembled a large otter but it was, in fact, a walking seal.

Natalia Rybczynski unearthed the new animal at Devon Island, Canada and worked out that it must have swam through the waters of the Arctic circle around 20-24 million years ago. She named it Puijila darwini after an Inuit word referring to a young seal, and some obscure biologist. The skeleton has been beautifully preserved, with over 65% of the animal intact, including its limbs and most of its skull.

Puijila is a massive boon for biologists trying to understand the evolution of pinnipeds, the group that includes seals, sea lions and walruses. It's not itself a direct ancestor, having branched off the evolutionary path that led to modern pinnipeds. It did, however, retain many of the same features that a direct ancestor would have had. " Puijila is a transitional fossil," Rybczynski explains. "It gives us a glimpse of what the earliest stages of pinniped evolution looked like, before pinnipeds had flippers. And it suggests that in the land-to-sea transition, pinnipeds went through a freshwater phase."

This familiar group evolved from land-dwelling carnivores and their closest living relatives are the bears and the mustelids (otters, weasels, skunks and badgers). For other marine mammals like whales and dolphins, the fossil record has given us dramatic visuals for the gradual transformation from land-dweller to full-time swimmer. But for pinnipeds, that transition is much murkier because until now, the earliest known seal Enaliarctos already had a full set of true flippers. Puijila changes all of that.

In the Origin of theSpecies, the ever-prescient Darwin wrote, "A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean". This year, on the 150th anniversary of the book's publication, the walking seal that bears his name pays a fitting tribute to Darwin's insight.

Puijila was just over a metre in length and had a long tail. Its four legs were short but strong, and would have been attached to its trunk by powerful muscles. The bones of its toes were somewhat flattened, which strongly suggests that they were webbed. In many ways, its skeleton was very similar to a modern otter's but the shape of its skull and teeth mark it out as a seal.

As examples, its bottom jaw had four incisors rather than the standard six of other carnivores. And it had a large "infraorbital foramen" - a hole beneath each eye through which whisker nerves would have passed. The wide hole suggests that, like modern seals, this animal had sensitive whiskers.

Based on these features, Rybczynski built a new family tree that included Puijila and other prehistoric carnivores, which rewrote some of their relationships. According to Rybczynski's analysis, Puijila and Enaliarctos belong to a small family of early pinnipeds that also includes Potamotherium (formerly thought to group with the weasel-like mustelids) and Amphicitceps (previously classified with the bears).

Compared to all other pinnipeds, it was the least specialised for life in the water, but it lived at the same time as the distinctly seal-like Enaliarctos. "In its time, Puijila would have been a 'living fossil'," says Rybczynski. It was a relict of a previous body plan that had since been refined for superior swimming.

Rybczynski thinks that Puijila swam using all four of its feet and it wouldn't have been anywhere as graceful as its modern cousins. Most otters swim by thrusting simultaneously with their hind legs and using their long tails. Seals also use their hind flippers by waving them from side-to-side, while sea lions rely on their front pair to fly through the water. Puijila 's four-legged swimming stroke represented a style that could easily have given rise to either of the techniques used by today's pinnipeds.

Puijila 's discovery also tells us about where the earliest seals may have evolved. It wouldn't have been suited to life at sea and probably lived and hunted in freshwater, suggesting that seals made the transition from land to sea via rivers and lakes. It lived in the Arctic and 23 million years ago, this region was cool and temperate, with freshwater lakes that would have frozen over in winter. Rybczynski speculates that these conditions may have driven the ancestors of seals to experiment with coastal environments. Free of ice, these would have provided them with opportunities to hunt even in the depths of winter.

Update: The Canadian Museum of Nature have developed an entire microsite dedicated to the new find! I'm really impressed - it's got some fantastic detail, great use of Flash and 3D animations. Go over and see Puijila up close.

Also have a look at Brian's excellent take at Laelaps.

Reference: Nature doi:10.1038/nature07985

Images: Painting by Mark Klingler; 3D reconstruction by Alex Tirabasso; skeleton laid out by Martin Lipman;

More on transitional fossils:
PS: I guarantee that someone, somewhere will get these details wrong, so two points are worth clarifying:

Puijila is not the "ancestor of seals"

This does not mean that seals "evolved from otters/bears" or other such nonsense

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Puijila, the walking seal - a beautiful transitional fossil

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Seals and sea-lions gracefully careen through today's oceans with the help of legs that have become wide, flat flippers. But it was not always this way. Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for.

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All about the "Marine Mammal Protection Act". Who passed this law? Why? What does it do? Who is exempt?

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The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was enacted on October 21, 1972. All marine mammals are protected under the MMPA. The MMPA prohibits, with certain exceptions, the "take" of marine mammals in U.S. waters and by U.S. citizens on the high seas, and the importation of marine mammals and marine mammal products into the U.S.

Jurisdiction for MMPA is shared by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The Service's Branch of Permits is responsible for issuing take permits when exceptions are made to MMPA.

In general, exceptions may be made for:

1. Pre-MMPA specimens taken before December 21, 1972

2. International Agreements entered into by the United States before December 21, 1972

3. Alaska natives

4. Scientific research, public display, enhancing the survival or recovery of a species, and incidental take in commercial fisheries

5. Waivers granted by the U.S. Government

MMPA and CITES

All cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), all sirenians (manatees and dugongs) and several marine carnivores (seals, otters, walrus, and polar bears) are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora ( CITES).

CITES applies to international shipments of listed species. It does not apply to activities conducted solely within the United States. The Service issues CITES permits for all marine mammals protected by CITES. For permitting information for marine mammals, visit our Permits page.

For more information on MMPA, visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was enacted on October 21, 1972. All marine mammals are protected under the MMPA. The MMPA prohibits, with certain exceptions, the "take" of marine mammals in U.S. waters and by U.S. citizens on the high seas, and the importation of marine mammals and marine mammal products into the U.S.

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Learn about these protected places and how they help marine mammals!

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California Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)

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Visit Gray Whales in their southern-most destination of their migration route!

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Saving the Ocean | Destination Baja | Episode 3 | PBS

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Fishermen stop hunting gray whales and develop a lucrative whale-watching co-op.

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Learn about your favorite marine mammals from the experts!

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Protecting Endangered Species

The Marine Mammal Center has worked extensively with species that are considered to be endangered or threatened, such as the southern sea otter, Hawaiian monk seal and Guadalupe fur seal. Threatened and endangered species are species that are at risk of extinction. These species are protected in the United States under the Endangered Species Act.

In addition, all marine mammals are protected in the United States by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which makes it illegal to harass, feed, hunt, capture or kill any marine mammal. As a nonprofit funded by people like you, The Marine Mammal Center has special permits from the federal government that allow us to respond to stranded marine mammals.

These laws, as well as other international laws and treaties protecting marine mammals, play a critical role in the survival of marine mammals and the health of our ocean ecosystem.

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Learn About Marine Mammals | The Marine Mammal Center

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The Marine Mammal Center has worked extensively with species that are considered to be endangered or threatened, such as the southern sea otter, Hawaiian monk seal and Guadalupe fur seal. Threatened and endangered species are species that are at risk of extinction. These species are protected in the United States under the Endangered Species Act.

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A California State Park Interpreter explains about whale migration along the California Coast

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It takes many adaptations for these mammals to survive the ocean! Here's what these amazing animals do to survive:

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What makes them mammals?

Whales and dolphins are mammals in that they breathe air, give birth to live young (not hatched from eggs), nurse their babies, and they are warm-blooded. Mammals also have hair or fur, but the most that can be found on whales and dolphins are usually a few whiskers around the snout of some newborns. Even this small remnant of hair usually falls out within a few weeks, leaving only small pits behind.

What adaptations have made marine mammals successful at ocean living?

Proof that long-ago relatives were land animals can be found in the vestigial tails in embryonic whales and in the bones in whales' flippers that look like human hands. But in most ways, whales and dolphins are supremely suited for life in the sea, with their:

streamlined shape for efficient movement through viscous medium, with no protruding ears, and little or no hair to slow them down

insulating blubber, a thick layer of fat and oil, which keeps their bodies warm and buoyant. This layer is thinner in warmer temperatures, and thicker in colder climates.

soft skin that sloughs off constantly

limbs evolved into fins and flippers dorsal fin for balance, side flippers for balance and steering, tail fluke's up and down movement provides powerful propulsion through the water

deep diving ability, due to:

the proteins in muscles use and store oxygen efficiently

their ability to tolerate high levels of carbon dioxide

fact that their rib cages collapse to compress further for deep dives

slower heartbeat while diving

blood is shunted away from areas that can tolerate low oxygen and to heart, lungs, brain where it is needed most

blowhole on top allows animal to surface to breathe while keeping most of body underwater

camouflage coloration/countershading--dark top blends in with dark depths when viewed from above; light belly blends in with sunlit surface when seen from below

ability to communicate over hundreds, even thousands of miles underwater

echolocation which makes them able to avoid obstacles and find prey in murky depths

How do beaked whales feed?

Baleen whales strain plankton through their bristly baleen; toothed whales swallow their prey in huge gulps. Most whales can ingest vast quantities of food through mouths that match their enormous size. Beaked whales, however, have small mouths and little or no teeth, but they still manage to devour squid and fish. How can they gobble up their meals through their dainty mouths? Photo: credit Nan Hauser & Hoyt Peckham, CCRC

John Heyning, curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, climbed into the tank of a rescued Hubb's beaked whale to find out for himself. He placed his hand over the whale's mouth which sucked it up like a dustball. Beaked whales use suction, as nurse sharks do, to swallow their prey.

Heyning and James Mead, curator of mammals at the National Museum of Natural History, have determined that beaked whales "use their tongues like pistons to suck in their prey."
(source: "Suction Power," National Wildlife, Oct/Nov, 1997)

How do feeding whales keep warm in frigid water?

John Heyning and James Mead have also made a curious discovery about the gray whale's mouth. A gray whale's five-foot-long tongue makes up fully 5% of its body surface area, a significant part of its body to be dragging through icy-cold waters. Slurping up krill in the Arctic Ocean should quickly chill the animal like eating ice cream in winter does to humans. But when the scientists dissected a gray whale tongue they discovered blood vessels clustered around the arteries that carry warm blood from the heart. As the blood circulates, its warmth is passed from the arteries which carry blood from the heart, to the surrounding vessels, which carry blood returning to the heart. These heat-conserving countercurrent exchanges are also found in other whale extremities-fins and flukes. (source: "Mighty Mouths: How Whales Keep the Heat," Science News, Nov. 8, 1997)

For a more detailed look at mammalian characteristics, see Animal Diversity Web

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Whales and dolphins are mammals in that they breathe air, give birth to live young (not hatched from eggs), nurse their babies, and they are warm-blooded. Mammals also have hair or fur, but the most that can be found on whales and dolphins are usually a few whiskers around the snout of some newborns.

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Plastic is a threat to all marine mammals, so take this time to read an article about a new discovery that may help break down those plastics!

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A garbage yard in Lucknow, India where plastic bottles are dumped before being sent to recycling. Abhimanyu Kumar Sharma / Moment / Getty Images

Scientists have engineered a mutant enzyme that converts 90 percent of plastic bottles back to pristine starting materials that can then be used to produce new high-quality bottles in just hours. The discovery could revolutionize the recycling industry, which currently saves about 30 percent of PET plastics from landfills, reported Science Magazine.

Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is the plastic used in soda bottles, textiles and packaging. With almost 70 million tons manufactured annually worldwide, it is also the most abundant polyester plastic because it is strong and lightweight, explains the study's abstract, which was published in Nature.

Unfortunately, current PET recycling is inefficient. When plastics of different colors are melted down during the recycling process, a gray or black plastic starting material results that few companies want to purchase to package their products, explained Science Magazine. The process results in low-grade plastic fibers only good enough for clothing and carpets, reported The Guardian. These eventually end up in a landfill or incinerated, added Science Magazine.

"It's not really recycling at all," explained professor John McGeehan, the director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, to Science Magazine.

McGeehan, who was not involved in the research, called the new enzyme "a huge step forward," reported Science Magazine. He also noted that Carbios, the French sustainable plastics company behind the breakthrough, is the industry leader in engineering enzymes to break down PET at large scale, reported The Guardian.

For years, scientists at the forefront of the cultural war on plastic waste have searched for microbial enzymes that could break down PET and other plastics. Recently, a group of German scientists discovered a bacterium that breaks down polyurethane plastic and uses it for food to fuel the process, but cautioned it might be a decade before commercial scale could be reached. Similarly, in 2018, researchers led by McGeehan accidentally discovered an enzyme that digests PET, but noted that it doesn't do so very quickly (a few days). Even the base enzyme used in Carbios' research, leaf-branch compost cutinase (LLC) has been studied since 2012, when it was discovered in a compost heap of leaves by researchers at Osaka University, reported Science Magazine.

The team at Carbios screened 100,000 micro-organisms for promising candidates, and eventually began introducing mutations to LLC. Native LLC falls apart after just a few days of working at 65°C, the temperature at which PET begins to soften but not yet melt, explained Science Magazine.

The researchers re-engineered LLC to work faster and at higher temperatures. Alain Marty, Carbios' chief scientific officer, teamed up with Isabelle Andre, an enzyme engineering expert at the University of Toulouse, to isolate an optimized enzyme that is 10,000 times more efficient at breaking down the chemical bonds in PET than native LLC, reported Science Magazine. It also functions at 72°C, close to the temperature at which PET melts, making the process even more efficient.

The mutant enzyme broke down 90% of 200 grams of PET in a small reactor in just 10 hours. Different colors didn't matter because the enzyme can ignore dyes and other plastics in the molten mix. The researchers were able to use the resultant chemical building blocks to produce new PET and food-grade plastic bottles that were just as strong as those made from virgin plastics, reported Science Magazine.

"It's a real breakthrough in the recycling and manufacturing of PET," said Dr. Saleh Jabarin, a member of Carbios' scientific committee in a company statement about the discovery. "Thanks to the innovative technology developed by Carbios, the PET industry will become truly circular, which is the goal for all players in this industry, especially brand-owners, PET producers and our civilization as a whole."

Carbios reports that the enzyme costs just 4% of what virgin plastic made from oil costs, noted The Guardian. The enzyme cannot be added to waste plastic until it is ground up and melted, however, so the recycled PET is still more expensive than virgin plastic. Still, McGeehan noted to Science Magazine that companies may be willing to pay a bit more for a recycled plastic that is as durable and attractive as the virgin material.

Carbios is partnering with major companies, including Pepsi and L'Oréal, to accelerate development and produce the new enzyme at scale, reported The Guardian. It is aiming for industrial-scale recycling within five years. Science Magazine reported that a demonstration plant that can recycle hundreds of tons of PET per year should be online by next year.

"We are the first company to bring this technology on the market," said Martin Stephan, the deputy chief executive at Carbios, to The Guardian. "Our goal is to be up and running by 2024, 2025, at large industrial scale."

McGeehan explained to The Guardian that the discovery could finally make true industrial-scale biological recycling of PET a possibility. The new enzyme is faster, more efficient and more heat-tolerant - qualities that make this such a large advancement for the field, he added.

McGeehan said, "It represents a significant step forward for true circular recycling of PET and has the potential to reduce our reliance on oil, cut carbon emissions and energy use, and incentivize the collection and recycling of waste plastic," reported The Guardian.

Related Articles Around the Web

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Mutant Enzyme Recycles Plastic in Hours, Could Revolutionize Recycling Industry

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The researchers re-engineered LLC to work faster and at higher temperatures. Alain Marty, Carbios' chief scientific officer, teamed up with Isabelle Andre, an enzyme engineering expert at the University of Toulouse, to isolate an optimized enzyme that is 10,000 times more efficient at breaking down ...

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How big do you think seals were 5 million years ago?

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Credit: Artwork by Peter Trusler, Author provided

When most of us think of the prehistoric past, we envision a world of bizarre, often fearsome giants. From dinosaurs to mammoths and even penguins, life then seemed larger than life today.

Millions of years ago in Australia, giant goannas, kangaroos and diprotodontids (wombat relatives) roamed the landscape. The seas teemed with gargantuan predators such as the infamous "megalodon" shark and so-called giant killer sperm whales.

Fossils from this lost world can be found in sandstone rocks, between five million and six million years old, at Beaumaris-a bayside suburb in Melbourne and one of Australia's most significant urban fossil sites. Here, fossils of ancient marine animals often wash ashore, eroded out of rocks by the tides.

However, some of these fossils are now revealing "jumbo" was not the only size for extinct animals. Our team's research, published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reports nine new seal fossils from Beaumaris, which we suspect came from nine different individuals.

The findings paint a picture of a relatively small animal, making its way through a world of giants.
More than doubling the seal fossil record
Melburnians have been collecting fossils from Beaumaris for more than 100 years. Yet it continues to produce remarkable and scientifically important finds.

The fossils we studied were found on the foreshore of Beaumaris, Melbourne. Credit: Erich Fitzgerald, Author provided

This includes extremely rare fossils of animals such as seals. Previously, scientists had studied only one seal fossil from this site.

The nine new fossils detailed in our research were collected and donated to Museums Victoria by local scientists and citizen scientists over the past 88 years. They have more than doubled the known fossil record of seals in Australia.

These fossils represent the oldest evidence of seals in Australia and were identified as "true seals," a group mostly known from the Arctic and Antarctic. True seals belong to a different group to Australia's fur seals and sea lions (eared seals), which only arrived in the region about 500,000 years ago.

In particular, one of the fossils we identified is a monachine (a southern true seal). Today, these are represented by animals such as leopard or elephant seals in the Southern Ocean surrounding the Antarctic, to which they are related.

Size estimates found the Beaumaris monachines to have been quite small, at only 1.7 meters long. This is similar to the size of today's Northern Hemisphere seals such as the harbor seal.

In total, we found nine seal fossil specimens from Beaumaris, from potentially nine different individuals. Credit: Erich Fitzgerald and James Rule, Author provided

However, the Beaumaris seal's living relatives are much larger-usually 3m long or more. Modern leopard seals can grow to more than 3m long, while elephant seals can reach up to a gigantic 5m in length.

Most fossil whales found at Beaumaris are also smaller than their living counterparts.

This is the opposite trend to many other animal groups with fossils found there, including some sharks and seabirds, wherein the extinct animals were much larger than those alive today.
An uncertain future for marine life
Why is finding small seals at Beaumaris important?

Five million years ago, before the ice ages, the average annual temperature in southeast Australia was about 2-4°C warmer than it is today, with sea levels up to 25m higher.

These warmer oceans supported a greater diversity of marine megafauna than today, with longer but less energy-efficient food chains. These chains only had room for a few large top predators, such as megalodon sharks. And this may have limited the size of other top predators, including seals.

The extinct Beaumaris seal was much smaller than its living relatives today. Credit: Peter Trusler, Author provided

This chart shows the history of seals' size evolution in Australia, compared to large sharks. Credit: Peter Trusler and James Rule, Author provided

This is important. It suggests the large size of Antarctic seals living in the Southern Ocean today is due to colder oceans with more energy-efficient food chains, in which more food is available for marine animals.

If climate change continues to warm the oceans, food chains may once again start to become less energy efficient, resulting in a loss of the resources today's large seals rely on for survival.

The discovery of seal fossils at Beaumaris has implications for not only unlocking the past, but also for contextualizing the future.

It shows the biodiversity and ecology of marine megafauna off southern Australia originated during the long-term transition from a warmer to colder world-a process that only recently began changing trajectory.

To this day, the fossil site at Beaumaris continues to reveal scientifically important finds, thanks to members of the public working with scientists from Museums Victoria.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In a land of ancient giants, these small oddball seals once called Australia home

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When most of us think of the prehistoric past, we envision a world of bizarre, often fearsome giants. From dinosaurs to mammoths and even penguins, life then seemed larger than life today. Millions of years ago in Australia, giant goannas, kangaroos and diprotodontids (wombat relatives) roamed the landscape.

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This Gray Whale was seen taking an unusual route. Scientists are now asking, "why?"

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A gray whale has swum the longest distance ever recorded in a marine vertebrate-more than 16,700 miles-over halfway around the world.

The male cetacean, spotted off Namibia in 2013, is the first gray whale ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

But it took several years of genetic research to confirm the whale originated in the North Pacific, according to a study published today in the journal Biology Letters.

There are two known populations of gray whales: eastern gray whales, whose numbers are stable, with around 20,500 individuals, and western gray whales, which are endangered, with an estimated 200 individuals left in the wild, mostly due to decades of commercial whaling. Eastern grays migrate from the seas around Alaska and Russia to breeding grounds in Baja California. Much less is known about western gray whale breeding grounds, but they've been recorded as feeding around eastern Russia. (Read more about why so many western gray whales are dying.)

When study co-author Simon Elwen, a zoologist at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, first heard of the 2013 sighting, "I was a bit dismissive," he says. "It's like someone saying they saw a polar bear in Paris-technically it could get there, but it just doesn't seem very realistic."

Photos confirmed it was indeed a gray whale, around 40 feet long. The animal stayed in Walvis Bay for two months, possibly because it was malnourished, allowing Elwen and Tess Gridley, also a University of Stellenbosch zoologist, to collect minimally invasive DNA samples. (See photos of the gray whale in Walvis Bay.)

The gray whale's incredible feat-which trumps the previous record-holder, a leatherback turtle tracked for 12,774 miles across the Pacific -has also left the scientists with questions: Namely, why would a gray whale go so far from home?

The authors speculate the rapid decline in sea ice in the Arctic due to climate change may be allowing gray whales to explore-or get lost in-new habitats, though there's not enough data to draw any conclusions.

For a whale that usually migrates around 5,000 miles, "it's very expensive to travel [so] far," says co-author Rus Hoelzel, an evolutionary biologist at Durham University in the U.K and a National Geographic Explorer. "It does make you wonder why they would do that, under what circumstances? For those reasons, it's scientifically interesting."

Digging into the genes

For their research, Gridley and Elwen teamed up with Hoelzel and Durham University evolutionary biologist Fatih Sarigol to compare the whale's genomes with other gray whale genomes stored in the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information, a digital repository for genomes of over a thousand organisms.

They wanted to rule out a possibility that the whale came from an unknown Atlantic population; there's fossil evidence of gray whales in the Atlantic, and twogray whale have been sighted in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean in recent years. (Learn how gray whales interact with people in Baja California.)

"There are cetacean species that we know very little about because they're just so hard to encounter," says Hoelzel. "But in the case of the gray whale, they do tend to be coastal and fairly recognizable, so the idea that there's this hidden population in the Atlantic is probably not very likely."

It turned out that the Namibian whale's genes did match with those of North Pacific gray whales stored in the biotechnology database. Surprisingly, the researchers say, the closest fit was with the endangered western population.

Wayward whale?

Next, the team analyzed possible routes the marine mammal could have taken, considering it most feasible that the animal journeyed around Canada through the Northwest Passage. Other options-such as circumnavigating South America or swimming through the Indian Ocean-are less likely, in part due to lack of reported sightings, and also because gray whales tend to feed in shallow water, making long trips over open ocean more difficult.

However, Sue Moore, a research scientist specializing in Pacific marine mammals at the University of Washington in Seattle, believes the Indian Ocean crossing is most likely, as it's the shortest and least complicated route. (Read about some of the longest and toughest animal migrations on Earth.)

"That said ... this whale was likely a vagrant," adds Moore, who wasn't involved in the research, suggesting that this was not a migration with a clear destination in mind.

"But," she says, "it does give us something very interesting to contemplate regarding the resilience of this species."

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A gray whale swam halfway across the world, setting a new record

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A gray whale has swum the longest distance ever recorded in a marine vertebrate-more than 16,700 miles-over halfway around the world. The male cetacean, spotted off Namibia in 2013, is the first gray whale ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.