Animal Facts Wednesday, by M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ9VoNIro-k

Today's Post is about ELEPHANT SEALS

From Wiki:

• Those nose flaps make a lot of noise and retain moisture
• 
  
• They are a conservation success story, hunted for their blubber (for lamp oil), there was some 150 left in the wild off some random island near Mexico by 1910. Now there are some 150,000.
  

• Bulls of both the northern elephant seal and the southern elephant seal reach a length of 16 ft (5 m) and a weight of 6,000 lb (3,000 kg), and are much larger than the cows, which typically measure about 10 ft (3 m) and 2,000 lb (900 kg)^[2][3].
  
• The largest known bull elephant seal weighed 5000 kg (11,000 lb) and measured 6.9 m (22.5 ft) in length. This makes the elephant seal the largest member of the order Carnivora.

• Elephant seals spend up to 80 percent of their lives in the ocean.
  
• They can hold their breath for over 80 minutes
• Elephant seals possess the ability to dive to 2000 meters beneath the ocean's surface^[4] (the deepest recorded dive of an Elephant Seal is 1,581m by a male in 1989^[5]). The average depth of their dives is about 300 to 600 meters, typically for around 20 min for females and 60 min (1 hour) for males,
  
• Their favorite foods, which are skates, rays, squid, octopuses, eels, and small sharks.
  
• Their stomachs also often contain gastroliths (rocks used to grind/digest matter).
• Females live around 23 years.
• Males live around 20 years.