Behavior
Adult and subadult males may form groups while moulting along the Antarctic Peninsula in late summer and early autumn. Adult females are gregarious but relatively asocial other than the strong bond they establish with their pups, although there are occasional aggressive encounters with nearby females or other pups and brief interactions with adult males to mate. These seals appear to be solitary when foraging and migrating. Females evidently remain at sea continually between breeding seasons, and juveniles may spend several years at sea before returning to natal sites to mate for the first time. The deepest recorded dive is about 180 m deep; the longest dive lasted 10 minutes. The diving ability of pups substantially improves during the first few months of life, and by about four months old their diving patterns are similar to those of adult females. Leopard seals eat Antarctic fur seal pups. Survival of suckling pups may be particularly low in years when krill abundance near a colony is insufficient to allow lactating females to forage effectively.
Read more about this topic: Antarctic Fur Seal
Famous quotes containing the word behavior:
“One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“Children, randomly at first, hit upon something sooner or later that is their mothers and/or fathers Achilles heel, a kind of behavior that especially upsets, offends, irritates or embarrasses them. One parent dislikes name-calling, another teasing...another bathroom jokes. For the parents, this behavior my have ties back to their childhood, many have been something not allowed, forbidden, and when it appears in the child, it causes high-voltage reaction in the parent.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person who I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)