WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES 



Cetacea) because they are air-breathing animals, with 

 mammahan characteristics, which share certain common 

 similarities and characteristics. 



Seals are excellent swimmers and divers, and are so 

 much at home in the sea, depending entirely for their 

 sustenance on living prey captured in the water, that 

 their universal habit of resorting to beaches, rocky eleva- 

 tions or ice-floes, to bask in the sun, sleep, or for the 

 purpose of bringing forth their young is a remarkable 

 one. Whales seek the shore-waters to copulate and deliver 

 their babies, but these acts take place in the water, and 

 it is in the water that the mother whale suckles her babies 

 at her breast. The seals, therefore, in their habits, are not 

 such marine creatures as the whales. 



The Alaskan seals, Callorhinus alascanus, spend most of 

 the year in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Yet they travel 

 periodically to one specific place, far from their hunting 

 grounds, to bear their young : the Pribilof Islands in the 

 Bering Sea. They are guided there by the same mysterious 

 instinct that directs the eels to the Sargasso weed and the 

 salmon to their breeding places high up the rivers. 



Unlike some other sea creatures, which are mono- 

 gamous, the large male seal forms his own harem of 

 several females, each of which presents him with one 

 baby yearly. The United States government rightly 

 controls the seal's breeding grounds, and only allows the 

 excess young males to be slaughtered for their fur — 

 otherwise fur-bearing seals would soon be exterminated. 



The supraorbital processes of the seal's brain are well 

 developed, in fact it is a highly intelligent animal in 

 many respects. The external ear is either wanting alto- 

 gether or very small — ^yet the seal has remarkably good 

 hearing. The upper divisions of the limbs are shorter than 

 the lower, and do not project beyond the body's skin. 

 Each limb has five toes, and these are webbed. There is a 

 short tail. Some seals are habitual stone-eaters, and their 

 stomachs are often found to be partly filled with stones, 



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