#1902 - Phocarctos hookeri - New Zealand Sealion
Spotted on the beach at Sandfly Bay on the South Island. @purrdence didn’t want to get any closer because she didn’t want to disturb the animal, and sealions are entirely capable of biting your face off if they feel threatened. They are one of the largest remaining native animals in New Zealand, with males up to 350 centimetres long and weighing up to 450 kilograms.
The Māori call them pakake, whakahao (male) and kake (female), and they’re endemic to New Zealand and its subantarctic islands. They’re the rarest sealion species with only 12,000 or so in the world - 99% of the global population breed on the Auckland and Campbell Islands, and they only started pupping again on the mainland in 1995. The entire mainland population was wiped out by hunters in the mid-19th century, but not for the first time. A previous genetically distinct population had been wiped out by the Maori between 1300 and 1500 CE, until they were replaced by ones from the Subantarctic, and a third population in the Chatham Islands wiped out by the Moriori around 1500 CE.
Pakake are unique among pinnipeds in that they prefer to have their pups up to 2km inland, in forests. This allows them to avoid aggressive males, severe weather, and parasitic infection, and is probably only possible because New Zealand had no large predators apart from the enormous Haast’s Eagle, right up until humans arrived. The eagles probably enjoyed the change in diet when they did.
The sealion’s diet includes various fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, seabirds, and other mammals including the New Zealand Fur Seal, but over a quarter of adult seals show scarring from close encounters with Great White Sharks. Populations are also threatened by starvation, introduced disease, car collisions when moving inland to pup, and attacks by people and dogs.
