Arctocephalus forsteri
Fur seals are shallow divers. Nobody told this one, which goes deeper and stays down longer than any of them.
As a group, fur seals are shallow workers. Several of the nine species rarely go past 30 or 40 m, and one of them spends most of its time in the top few metres of the ocean. This one holds records the whole family would otherwise lose to the true seals. The IUCN lists maximum values of 312 m and 9.3 minutes for adult females and 380 m and 14.8 minutes for adult males, and New Zealand's Department of Conservation states plainly that kekeno dive deeper and for longer than any other fur seal.
The routine diving is impressive on its own. Females on the South Australian continental shelf typically work 60 to 80 m and males on the slope 100 to 200 m. They feed almost entirely at night, diving continuously from sundown to sunrise, reaching 163 m in summer and regularly passing 100 m in autumn and winter.
Different animals also use different parts of the ocean, which keeps them out of each other's way. Males take the continental slope, adult females the shelf and then the open ocean, and juveniles chase lanternfish that rise toward the surface after dark. It is one coastline divided three ways.
From December to March, a nursing female makes short trips to shelf waters 70 to 90 km from the colony, where upwelling concentrates food. Then in April and May most of them do something drastic. They abandon the continental shelf altogether and start foraging in open ocean at the Subtropical Front, 700 to 1,000 km south of where their pup is waiting.
And then they keep doing it, month after month, until the pup is weaned in September or October. Foraging trips lengthen from three to five days early in lactation to eight to eleven days later on, with trips of more than twenty days not unusual, separated by shore visits of a day or two. Pups suckle for about 300 days and some carry on into a second year.
When the young finally leave, they leave properly. Weaned juveniles have been recorded more than 1,000 km from the beach where they were born.
The name is the description. This seal has a long, pointed muzzle ending in a fleshy nose that extends past the mouth, with the nostrils angled forward and slightly down, larger in males. Australia thought that feature distinctive enough to rename the animal after it. The coat is dark greyish brown above and paler below, and because the guard hairs are white tipped, a dry seal carries a silvery sheen while a wet one looks almost black. Under those guard hairs sits the dense underfur that defines the family, trapping a layer of air against the skin so the animal can work cold water without much blubber. The muzzle, the ear flaps and the skin around them are noticeably paler, grey to rusty tan, against a dark head.
Those ear flaps, long and prominent, are the visible half of what makes this an eared seal. The other half is how it moves. The fore flippers are long and do the swimming, sweeping like wings, while the hind flippers steer. On land the hind flippers swing forward under the body and the seal walks on all four limbs, which is why kekeno can climb boulders, scale ledges and cross rough ground that would strand a harbour seal.
That climbing ability has an odd consequence. The MÄori name kekeno means "the one who looks around", a fair description of an animal that spends long stretches ashore with its head up and its neck extended, scanning. Combine good land mobility with a habit of exploring and you get a seal that turns up where seals are not supposed to be.
Before people arrived, kekeno bred all around the New Zealand mainland and the subantarctic islands. MÄori subsistence hunting after Polynesian settlement cut the range back and eliminated the North Island colonies. Then European commercial sealing in the 1700s and 1800s took the species close to extinction. More than 930,000 skins are known to have left New Zealand and Australian harbours, with the Australian effort concentrated between 1800 and 1830, and whole colonies were erased. Recovery was slow and was interrupted by sporadic culls in the twentieth century as numbers began to climb. Full protection came with New Zealand's Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978 and, in Australia, through state law and the Commonwealth EPBC Act.
The recovery figures from South Australia are among the best documented anywhere in this archive. The South Australian population increased 3.6 fold between 1989/90 and 2013/14. At the Cape Gantheaume Wilderness Protection Area on Kangaroo Island, annual monitoring recorded an 11.7 fold increase over 26 years, from 457 pups in 1988/89 to 5,333 pups in 2013/14, averaging about 10 percent a year. Be careful with the global figure, though. The commonly quoted 200,000 traces back to an estimate made in 2001 that has never been repeated, and the IUCN states outright that there are no comprehensive data for a species total. Roughly half of all these seals live in Australia, where the most recent count gives about 117,400 animals, 83 percent of them in South Australia.
The main direct human cause of death now is bycatch in trawl fisheries. Fisheries New Zealand estimated 341 captures in New Zealand trawl fisheries in 2020/21, with a range of 213 to 554, at a rate of 0.48 seals per 100 tows. That is a genuine improvement on 2007/08, when an estimated 715 were caught. Of 1,420 observed trawl captures between 2002/03 and 2014/15, only 13 percent were recorded as released alive. The fisheries most involved are the winter hoki fishery and southern blue whiting, and the population level impact is still called uncertain, because inshore trawlers carry few observers.
The Society for Marine Mammalogy now lists this animal's primary common name as the long-nosed fur seal, with New Zealand fur seal second. The change was proposed by Shaughnessy and Goldsworthy in 2015, and the reasoning is not trivial.
Start with the geography. Most of the world's Arctocephalus forsteri live in Australia, not New Zealand, and the IUCN account flags the problem itself. Then add the politics. In Australia the name "New Zealand fur seal" was being used by some fishers to argue that the animal was a foreign species that did not belong in Australian waters and therefore did not deserve protection. It has been in Australia for as long as anyone has records. The name was doing real damage, so it was changed.
It is a useful thing to notice. A common name is not just a label. It carries an implied claim about where an animal belongs, and people will build arguments on top of that claim whether or not it is true.
Read every section and answer the fact check below to unlock the New Zealand Fur Seal genome.
Three questions. First guess pays 25 DNA, second guess pays 20. Miss twice and you see the answer for free.