Did you know that the Northern Elephant Seal (Mirounga angustirostris) was hunted so heavily in the 18th century that by the 1870’s the global population was fewer than one-hundred individual seals? Hunted for the oil in their blubber, the species was decimated. Were it not for a population of eight survivors on Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja, Mexico, the Northern Elephant Seal would be extinct today. Inbreeding and the rare survivor of a genetic bottleneck, the elephant seal population now exceeds 100,000 individuals and can be easily viewed during the breeding season throughout rookeries between San Luis Obispo and San Francisco.
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