Elephant seals have sixth sense that helps them amazingly do this

By Gwyn Wright via SWNS

Elephant seals have a sixth sense that helps them find their way home to give birth.

Every year, pregnant female elephant seals make a 10,000 kilometer (6,213 miles) trek over 240 days across the Eastern North Pacific Ocean, but they return to their breeding beaches to give birth within five days of arriving back.

Researchers in the US have found the creatures know how far away from their breeding beach they are and have an inbuilt sense of how long it will take them to get back.

Academics have long known elephant seals are expert navigators but they have not known how seals manage to get back just in time for the breeding season.

For the new study, researchers used satellite tracking data they gathered from 100 adult female seals.

They figured out when each of them turned around to head back to the beach where they started.

The data showed seals decided to turn around based on how far away they were from where they needed to go.

Their decisions to turn around were not related to their body condition or how fat they were.

The researchers don’t yet know what clues the elephant seals use to keep track of where they are and head in the right direction at the right time, but it is clear that they can adjust the timing of their travels based on an internal perception of time and space.

The results give the researchers a better understanding of the animals, which they say will help conservation efforts.

In future they want to work out exactly how precise the seals’ navigational abilities are and establish which clues are most important for the creatures.

Study author Dr. Roxanne Beltran of the University of California Santa Cruz said: “We found that migrating elephant seals know how far they are from their breeding beach thousands of kilometers away.

“They also know approximately how long it will take them to get back.

“We were surprised that foraging success or percent body fat was not more strongly related to when seals begin the return portion of the migration.

“We expected that highly successful (i.e. fatter) seals might end their foraging trips earlier, but that was not the case; instead, it seems like they are well programmed to turn around strategically based on where they are and in turn how long it will take them to get back.”

The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.