Weaners
After suckling her pup for about twenty-eight days, the mother elephant seal shuts off the supply of rich milk. The mother weans her pup abruptly so that she can return to the sea and replenish her depleted nutritional supplies after having fasted since coming ashore to give birth.
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In so doing, she will leave her pup, now re-named ' weaner ', to fend for itself on the beach. ( Some weaners, usually male ones, try to get more milk from other females. If they succeed, they can balloon to enormous sizes, weighing up to five hundred pounds and earning the name super-weaner. )
By mid-March, all of the females have left their weaned pups to return to the sea in search of much-needed food. The beach is then composed almost soley of weaners with a few large males left to protect them from amorous younger males or carnivorous land animals such as coyotes until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. Their natal beach will, in most instances, remain their home for the following month or so, as they largely live off the fat reserves built up from suckling.
Left to their own devices, they sleep quite a bit in groups known as weaner pods, lying next to and on top of each other. During the time they are awake, they move around the beach communicating with one another by making shrill calls.
Not too long after they're weaned, their black fur changes into a shiny silver-gray coat. This beautiful gray is the distinctive color for weaners, and one they will keep until it turns to a honey-brown color over the course of a few months.
The inborn traits of the elephant seals that start from the moment the pup is born become more refined as the weaners grow older.
These traits include:
a/ sand-flipping
b/ snorting
c/ yawning
d/ emitting different vocalizations
e/ raising a fore-flipper
f/ bending over backwards ( females )
g/ pointing their noses skyward ( males )
h/ mock fighting ( males )
As time passes, the weaners spend more and more time in the relative safety of the shallow tide pools made available when the tide goes out, or in the fresh/brackish-water creeks that run out to the sea. Mostly, they seem to delight in honing their swimming skills and learning how to forage for marine life amongst the rocks.
Often, both when the weaners head towards the sea and when they return, they will call out to one another until they get a reply.
The older they get, the more time the weaners spend in the water, departing the shore at low tide and returning as the tide rises again.
All this physical activity and not having much in the way of nutritional intake causes the plump bodies of the weaners to decrease in size and their muscles become more toned readying them for their life of swimming and diving for food at sea.
Over the next two to three months, as the weaners spend more and more time in the water, they venture further and further away from their home shore. Sometimes, they get caught up in the ocean currents and have to come ashore on different beaches to rest. When coming ashore, they head to the part of the beach from which they get answering calls from other weaners. If, by chance, there are no answering calls, and the weaner is too exhausted to keep looking, he/she will spend some time sleeping and resting on that shore. Then, after having recouped strength, the weaner will set off again in search of his/her peers.
When weaners come ashore on beaches occupied by older elephant seals who are resting and/or going through their catastrophic molt, they will call out hoping to hear a familiar response from another weaner. If they do get the hoped-for response, they'll head over to that part of the beach. If they don't, they try to stay out of the way of the older elephant seals already established in the hierarchy.
The annual coastal upwelling, which usually occurs in the Pacific Ocean from April through August along the central coast of California, brings with it cold and nutrient rich water. This, in turn, provides food for each level of the oceanic food chain, and it is within this time frame that the weaners set out on their first ocean-going trip to forage. It is also the time when the other elephant seals return in shifts to the beaches to molt.