About me
I'm Donald, and I'm a little obsessed with seals.
This whole archive exists because I got tired of seals being treated like the ocean's background characters.
This whole archive exists because I got tired of seals being treated like the ocean's background characters.
Most people meet a seal for about four seconds. They see one at a zoo, or a dark head pops up in the water at the beach, and then it's gone and they go back to whatever they were doing. That's the whole relationship.
What got me was finding out what happens in the parts nobody watches. That seal that disappeared under the water? It might be going down eight hundred feet in total darkness. Its heart is slowing to a few beats a minute on purpose. It is hunting a fish it cannot see, by feeling the tiny swirl the fish left in the water with its whiskers. Then it comes back up, hauls out on a rock, and looks like a friendly potato.
That gap is the thing. They look soft and slow and a little bit silly, and they are secretly some of the most extreme athletes on the planet. Nothing else does both.
When I look up seals, I usually find one of two things. Either it's a cute video with no information in it at all, or it's a scientific paper I can't get through. There isn't much in the middle for someone who genuinely wants to know things.
So I made the middle. Every page here has real facts, checked against actual sources, written so you can actually read them. And because reading a wall of text is not most people's idea of fun, I made it pay you. Every section you read gives you seal DNA. Save enough and you can build your own seal and keep it in your aquarium.
You learn something true, and you get something cool. That seemed like a fair trade.
If you read every page here, you'll end up knowing more about seals than almost anyone you'll meet. But the thing I actually want you to walk away with is smaller than that.
Seals are not decoration. They are not there to be cute for us. They are hunting, freezing, diving, fighting, raising pups on ice that is trying to kill them, and they are doing it in an ocean that is changing fast. Some of them are in real trouble and most people have no idea.
Learning about an animal is the first step to caring what happens to it. That's the entire point of this website.
My dad writes books about hospitals and how things flow through them, and he helped me put this site together. He says the reason a site like this works is the same reason his training programs work: people don't remember what you tell them, they remember what they figure out. So this site doesn't tell you about seals. It makes you go find out.