Phocarctos hookeri
Known in Maori as pakake, and the only seal in the world that raises its young in a forest.
Sea lions are generally shallow water animals. New Zealand sea lions are not. Females average dives of 129 m lasting 3.9 minutes, and individuals have been recorded going deeper than 600 m and staying down 14.5 minutes. Those are the deepest and longest dives ever documented for any of the fifteen eared seal species.
To put 600 m in perspective, it is nearly twice the height of Auckland's Sky Tower, straight down, in cold dark water, on one breath. And it is not a stunt. Lactating females at the Auckland Islands travel an average of 423 km on a single foraging round trip, with a maximum recorded trip of 1,087 km, and they dive almost continuously while at sea, spending just over half their time underwater.
They hunt both on the seabed and in the water column, taking yellow octopus, arrow squid, hoki, hake, rattail, opalfish, red cod, salps and squat lobsters in the subantarctic. Animals on the Otago and Catlins coast dive much shallower, mostly under 30 m on rocky reefs, and eat barracouta, jack mackerel, octopus, skate, flounder, blue cod and kahawai. Their only known natural predator is the great white shark, and at Sandy Bay one study found 27 percent of adults carrying shark bite scars. That extreme diving comes at a cost. Working that hard, that deep, close to physiological limits, leaves little margin if the food supply thins.
This is the fact about New Zealand sea lions that stops people. Among all 34 species of pinniped in the world, this is the only one that regularly leaves the shore and heads inland.
After mating, a mother leads her pup off the beach, up through the tall subantarctic grass and into forest, sometimes as far as 2 km from the water. She leaves the pup there and goes back to sea to feed. Several explanations have been proposed and are probably all partly true: it gets the pup away from harassment by non breeding males, it provides shelter from wind and storms, and it reduces exposure to the hookworms that build up in crowded beach colonies.
On the mainland this behaviour puts sea lions where nobody expects them, on golf courses, sports fields and in pine plantations. It also creates hazards no other seal faces: roads and fences that block the route inland, and vehicle strikes.
Early observers took the bull and the female for separate species, and you can see why. A fully mature bull is blackish brown over the whole body, some appearing essentially black, with a mane of long coarse guard hairs over a hugely enlarged neck that widens from behind the ears to the shoulders, so head and neck read as one wedge. An adult female beside him is buff to creamy or silvery grey above and pale yellow below. IUCN summarises the gap as males being 1.2 to 1.5 times longer and three to four times heavier than females. That extreme difference between the sexes is an eared seal hallmark, and most true seals are nothing like it. In several ice seal species the female is actually the larger one.
The other family traits are here too, though you have to look. The ear flaps are small and inconspicuous, easily lost in a bull's mane, but they exist, and no true seal has them. The front flippers are black, hairless and leathery, with the first digit longest and curving backwards to give a swept back look, and they are the engine: this animal rows through the water with its arms, where a true seal drives itself with its rear end. On land the hind flippers turn forward under the hips and take weight, which is exactly what allows a mother to walk 2 km inland through grass and forest carrying nothing but her own bulk. A true seal could not make that journey at all.
One useful field mark separates this species from the New Zealand fur seal that shares its coast: the muzzle. New Zealand sea lions have a short, wide muzzle, blunt to rounded at the end, in both sexes. A fur seal's snout is pointed and V shaped, and its whiskers extend well past the ears while a sea lion's barely reach them.
Archaeology and ancient DNA show that New Zealand sea lions once bred right around the North Island, the South Island, Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands. A genetically distinct mainland lineage was hunted out between roughly 1300 and 1500 AD, and a separate Chatham Islands lineage was wiped out as well. The surviving subantarctic animals slowly spread into the empty niche, European sealing in the early 1800s then hammered the Auckland Islands population, and New Zealand banned sealing in 1893.
For a hundred years afterwards, males kept turning up on the Otago coast. Females did not. Then in 1993 a pregnant female tagged at the Auckland Islands swam more than 400 km north and gave birth to a female pup at Taiari Mouth in Otago, the first mainland birth in roughly 150 years. Locals called her Mum. Her pup was named Katya. Mum stayed and kept breeding, producing eleven pups up to her last recorded birth in 2007.
As of 2025, every single pup born along the Otago coast is descended from Mum. Three of her daughters produced seven daughters between them who also became mothers. A second, unrelated female from the Auckland Islands began breeding in the Catlins in 2007, founding a second front. Rakiura, also called Stewart Island, has gone from 16 pups in 2011 to 96 in 2025 and was formally recognised as a breeding colony in 2021. It is a small recovery against a very large loss, but it is real, and it started with one animal making one long swim.
The arrow squid trawl fishery around the Auckland Islands reported its first sea lion drownings in 1978. Between 1995 and 2007, estimated mortality averaged 92 animals a year, about 3.7 percent of the mature animals in the area, and up to 91 percent of those killed were female. Every breeding female killed also meant a lost unborn pup and a dependent pup starving ashore.
From 2001 the industry introduced the sea lion exclusion device, or SLED: a metal grid angled at 45 degrees inside the trawl net, through which squid pass while a sea lion is too big and gets deflected upward to an escape hatch. SLEDs became legally mandatory in the Auckland Islands squid fishery on 12 January 2022. Fisheries New Zealand figures indicate that 88 percent of sea lions entering a SLED fitted midwater trawl net swim out, though only 57 percent do in a bottom trawl, and that 5 to 7 percent of those that escape run out of air before reaching the surface. Total trawl deaths are now estimated at around six animals a year. That is a genuine improvement and should be reported as one. It should also be reported that the science is contested: the IUCN assessment states plainly that there is uncertainty about how well SLEDs work and about the overall impact of fisheries on this population. Both things are true at once.
The population figures need the same care. IUCN's 2015 assessment lists 3,031 mature individuals, but that assessment is more than a decade old and IUCN itself flags it as needing updating. New Zealand's own 2024 threat assessment, published in 2025, moved the species from Nationally Vulnerable to Nationally Endangered, calculated about 6,735 non pup animals in 2024, and concluded that the actual number of mature individuals is likely fewer than 5,000. The best current total is about 10,151 animals in 2022, with a credible interval running from 8,702 to 12,082. Auckland Islands pup production was 1,376 in the 2024 to 2025 season against a peak of 3,021 in 1997 to 1998. The 2023 report notes honestly that although the total appears to have fallen about 4 percent since 2015, the evidence for that decline is weak because the credible intervals overlap. Almost all breeding still happens at two island groups, which leaves the species badly exposed to a single outbreak or shock.
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