I’m willing to bet that every person watching this video has a name,
a particular way to refer to yourself and for others to refer to you,
be it one that you were given or one that you chose.
There’s something universally human about having a name.
They’re often one of the first things exchanged when people meet
and they can contain a lot of information about a person.
And we’re not the only animals that have them.
Male elephant seals also have names,
individual rhythms that identify them to other males that they keep throughout their lives.
And, not only do they have names like we do, it looks like they also have naming trends.
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There are two species of elephant seal: one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern.
The northern elephant seal can be found in the Pacific Ocean
from the Gulf of Alaska to Baja California,
while the southern elephant seal ranges from 40 degrees latitude south to Antarctica.
And they are BIG.
Photos of them just chilling on a beach do not do their size justice.
The southern elephant seal is the largest living member of the order Carnivora,
beating out lions, tigers, and polar bears.
For context, one record-setting polar bear
from Alaska stood about 3.6 meters tall on its hind legs
and weighed just over 1000 kilograms.
Full-grown males of the southern elephant seal can measure up to 6 meters long
and weigh up to 3700 kilograms.
And while the inflated, elongated nose, called a proboscis,
of male elephant seals might make them look kinda goofy,
they are not to be messed with.
During elephant seal breeding season,
late September to early November in the south and December to March in the north,
these huge males congregate on beaches to battle it out for mates.
Their duels include everything from vocalizations, basically seal shouting matches,
to actual physical fights that can leave the combatants bloody and scarred.
And the outcomes of these battles establish the social hierarchy on the beach for the season.
The biggest winners maintain so-called harems of female seals with whom they mate,
the mid-ranking males occasionally get access to mates,
and the lowest ranking males are out of luck.
For most males, not fighting is preferable to actually duking it out,
at least you live to see another season.
If you aren’t likely to win, fighting is just a waste of energy
with potentially fatal consequences, so you need a good way to weigh your odds.
And this is where names come in.
As they fight, the males honk at each other,
essentially announcing their identity in a series of calls, like beating out a rhythm on a drum.
The pitch and tempo of the honks are unique to each male,
making elephant seals the only mammal
that’s been experimentally shown to use rhythm to communicate in the wild.
And the males learn and remember the names of their rivals,
and whether they won or lost the last time they faced them.
Recognizing who’s honking allows the males to figure out what to do in a given situation.
If you’re the top seal on the beach, you fight every challenger, you have the most to lose.
If you’re a mid-ranking male, you back off when the dominant males start honking,
but you’ll attack a lower-ranking male, you’re pretty sure the odds are in your favor.
But, okay,
how many different ways can honks and beats be arranged
to make a unique name for every male elephant seal?
Like, our language abilities as human beings are incredible and complex,
and yet I am not even the only Sarah that works at this company.
Well, it turns out that the patterns of honks that elephant seals use for names
have changed over time and from place to place,
almost like the trends we see in human names.
And the researchers think that, in northern elephant seals,
it may be because they were hunted almost to extinction in the late 1800s.
As few as 20 individuals are thought to have survived,
all congregating to breed in one colony off the coast of Baja, Mexico,
becoming the ancestors of the more than 200,000 seals alive today.
After they were granted protected status in 1922 and given a chance to bounce back,
researchers in 1969 noticed that males that left the original colony
to establish new breeding sites
tended to use faster tempos to communicate their names.
But by the mid 2010s, the differences in tempo between breeding colonies had been lost.
This might be due to breeding sites becoming less isolated,
as the seal population had grown and males had moved between colonies,
taking their beats with them.
But! New variation had taken their place.
Males now have more individual variation between their calls
and use more complex rhythms than they did 50 years ago.
So, for example, back in the 1960s, you might’ve had seals with simpler calls,
sort of like single-syllable names in people, which sound like this:
[rhythmic elephant seal call]
Today, though, you might get beats more like this:
[more complex rhythmic elephant seal call]
along with the simpler beats.
And the researchers propose that it’s probably because
there are just more males now for the other northern males to keep track of
than there were when the population was tiny.
As far as naming trends go for male southern elephant seals,
it looks like males that haven’t yet reached breeding age take some time
to figure out what their “name” is going to be.
And some research even suggests that they try to
imitate the beats dropped by the dominant male in their colony,
their names are attempts at imitating his.
Which doesn’t seem any weirder to me than the way human naming trends get started.
So, maybe elephant seals aren’t actually all that bizarre, by our standards.
Unless you count the part where they fight by shouting their own name at each other.
You can sign up for the pin club from now through the end of February 6th.
Check out how great this guy’s schnoz is!
When you sign up, you’ll get the elephant seal in the middle of the month
and the pins after that around the time we upload each new episode.
And as always profits from the pin club and all of our merch go to support
our community’s efforts to decrease maternal mortality in Sierra Leone.
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