Australian Fur Seal
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ID#35
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Australians Fur Seal have light brown fur when they are dry. When they come out of water, they have a mane of black. Their stomachs are tan though, and as you go down the stomach gets darker until it is brown. The Australian Fur Seal is sexually dimorphic, meaning that the only feature that is different is that the female is a lot smaller than the male. The male Australian Fur Seal is 350 pounds average, while the female weighs 100 pounds average! Also the male is an average of 6 feet, while the average female is 4 feet! Another feature of The Australian Fur Seal is that its teeth are very sharp. Unlike other seals, Australian fur seals have external ears!
The Australian Fur Seal lives in a group known as a colony. The Australian Fur Seal is diurnal meaning that it is active during the day and sleeps at night. The Australian Fur Seal’s diet is quite simple, but how it gets its food is very interesting. They eat mostly fish, such as squid, krill, octopuses, cuttlefish and in rare cases penguins. The Australian Fur Seal sometimes hunts on land. It dives to depths of up to 200 feet to get its food. Their only predators are sharks. During mating season, which is November-March, the Australian Fur Seal has some very interesting behaviors. The males fight in violent, brutal battles to determine dominance. They mate and breed on rocks and beaches. The male has its first breed at the age of five, and the female has its first breed between five and seven years of life. Then they have a gestation period of about three hundred sixty days. Each litter only has one child; also the Australian Fur Seal does not lay eggs, because it is a mammal. Australian Fur Seals breed once a year. The male Australian Fur Seal lives only fifteen years, while the female lives up to twenty-five years. There is no interesting term that explains a baby Australian Fur Seal. The Australian Fur Seal had been endangered because it was hunted for its fur, resulting in a decline in population to only twenty thousand. Discarded fishing gear is another threat to the Australian Fur Seal. Since the government limited hunting however, the population is steadily growing. however the Australian Fur Seal is the fourth rarest seal in the world! An interesting fact is that people can take a long stick, and gently rub it on the Australian fur seals whiskers, which tickles the seal and causes it to back off the beach. |