Leopard Seals Play and Hunt in Antarctica | National Geographic
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On every story I do, you need that superstar, charismatic, you know, sexy megafauna species to draw people in. In this case, obviously, an Antarctic—it’s the leopard seal.
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To get in the water with this leopard seal, have it come racing over to me and do these big threat displacements. This is a seal that’s 12 feet long, over a thousand pounds, bigger than a grizzly bear. But they’re actually intelligent, nurturing, caring animals that are very complex.
When you look at this tree historic serpentine appearance of a leopard seal, they’re designed for speed. They’ve got these long pectoral flippers that when they’re on a chase of a penguin, they can turn those, and they can spin within the length of their body while doing 20 miles an hour. It’s beautiful to watch them hug.
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When the penguins come to see you, see them get focused. They tuck their pecks in, and they’re off like Rockettes: boom! They grab the penguin, and then you watch how they do the shake, using centrifugal force to turn the penguin inside out.
And then they carefully select the best parts of the meat off that penguin, and then they go on to the next one. Even though they’re at the top of the food chain, their main diet is krill.
When you look at bad ice years, when you have really low production of annual sea ice, you get a low production in krill. That’s what’s making leopard seals, like every species in Antarctica, vulnerable.
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You.