[Leica] There Be Beasties

[cummer at netvigator.com (H&ECummer)]

Jayanand,
These all be great! Hippos of the sea. Thanks for posting.
Howard

Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2014 18:49:03 +0530
From: Jayanand Govindaraj <jayanand at gmail.com>
Subject: [Leica] There Be Beasties...
To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>, PSM

Elephant Seals look like prehistoric beasts, something out of a fantasy
novel, or an RPG computer game, weird and sort of out of this world. In
Gold Harbour, there were hundreds of juvenile males, most of them lying in
groups, moulting their skin, piled close to each other, in a pungent
mixture of mud, water and their excreta. Their mating season gets over in
November, so the 5 tonne fully grown adult males were all out to sea,
feeding and replenishing their reserves. They are quite amazing beasts, and
radio tracking has now confirmed that they dive to 5000+ feet in the ocean,
resurface for half a minute and dive again to the same depth. Nobody has as
yet cottoned on to the body chemistry that allows them to do that, and
research is still active around this.