Guadelupe's other pinnipeds - California sealions

Northern elephant seals aren't the only pinnipeds on Guadelupe island, there are actually two other types of shark snack smaller species of pinniped. Of these one is a rare endemic found only on a couple of small islands like Guadelupe - the Guadelupe Fur Seal. This is a fur seal and hence more closely related to the sealions than the true seals. Its pretty big - sexually dimorphic with huge bulls having harems of females and covered in nice fur which meant like the elephant seal (but for fur not blubber) it took a clobbering from sealers up to the 19th century. GIFS was apparently down to a few dozen but is now back up to perhaps 10,000 individuals. As such the seals are spreading north in small numbers to a few other isolated islands including California's channel islands. I'm reasonably happy I may have seen one of these at Guadelupe but not entirely convinced and I certainly don't have a nice photo to show you. They do however look a lot like the Cape Fur Seals I photographed from a distance on South Africa's seal island. I don't by the way think its a coincidence that all 3 of the best places to see white sharks in the world (seal island, Guadelupe and Australia's Neptune Islands) have big populations of fur seals. I assume they must be either the easiest to catch, or most delicious, of all the pinnipeds - a seal equivalent of a cadbury's dairy milk if you will.

I can however show you a picture of the other, less rare, pinniped of Guadelupe - the California sealion and, to prove its at Guadelupe, lets show one with a shark in it too.....

Some would call this playing with fire.....

The sea lion above is basically indulging in the same behaviour our backyard birds do when mobbing a hawk or owl. Its far more maneuverable than the shark and has a number of obstacles to throw in the shark's path - the anchor chain (that line spoiling my photo), our cages and the boat itself - if things turn bad.

Of course its not all hard work and derring do when you're a sealion. A large proportion of their time seems to be taken up with chilling, making loud honking noises and smelling absolutley disgusting.

These are doing just that between San Francisco's famous piers.