FREQUENCY WITH WHICH SEALS FEED. 63 



St. George and distributed among the natives. On arriving at St. George the sea was too rough to 

 make a landing, iind we were compelled to remain on board. Several days passed, and, in the mean- 

 time, the salmon were not improving with age. The usual number of seals were playing about the 

 ship, and Mr. J. Stanloy-Browu suggested that we feed them with the salmon. The first salmon had 

 no sooner struck the water than it was grabbed by a seal and devoured. This, of course, attracted 

 other seals, and soon quite a number were on the lookout for something to eat. Some six or eight 

 salmon were thrown overboard, all of which were eaten. 



Aucl yet two seals which were taken to Woodward's Gardens, San Francisco, 

 refused to eat, and starved. . 



Neither, so far as is shown by the stomach contents, does the seal feed on crabs 

 or other crustaceans,' although these probably form a large portion of the diet of its 

 cousin, the sea lion E%imetopias. But two stomachs of this animal have come under 

 my notice, and they both contained fragments of the common crab of the Pribilofs 

 and bones of sculpins, both indicating that the sea lion is a bottom feeder. It was, 

 however, suspected that crabs must form a large part of the sea lion's food from the 

 peculiar chalky nature of the excrement about the hauling grounds of these animals. 



The hair seal found about the Pribilofs feeds to a considerable extent on the 

 Octopus ( Octopus pimctatus), and to some extent on crabs, but in only one case has 

 the remains of the octopus been found in a fur seal. 



That the fur seal has a good, healthy appetite„and when he does eat amply 

 makes up for his long fasts, may be inferred from the fact that bones of 5 good-sized 

 pollock were found in one stomach and remains of 41 small pollock, about 6 inches 

 long, in another, while a third individual had eaten 139 of the little sealflsh. The 

 Alaskan i)ol]ock certainly has a hard life in Bering Sea being preyed upon by the 

 seal above and the cod below, and if any creature has cause to rejoice over the 

 destructive work of the pelagic sealer that creature is the pollock. 



In regard to squids, one male seal had, as indicated by the beaks, devoured at 

 least 155, while a female had made way with no less than 210. It must be borne in 

 mind, however, that this does not mean that all these were eaten at one time, for a 

 study of the stomach contents shows that food is eaten and the hard parts regurgi- 

 tated continually and irregularly, for while, as noted above, bones representing five 

 pollock were taken from one stomach, by no means all the bones were present, and 

 in other cases the stomach contained bones of several fishes in very different stages 

 of digestion, indicating i^lainly that they had been eaten at different times. 



The stomach contents of a seal taken on September 3, near latitude 57° 20' ]N"., 

 longitude 172° 45' W., illustrate this point very well, and also give some hint of the 

 distance traveled by feeding seals. These contents consisted of some vertebrse of 

 a salmon, much digested, the beaks of two squids, and the fresher remains of three 

 small pollock. The salmon had doubtless been taken somewhere in the vicinity of 

 the Aleutian Islands, the squid between those islands and the locality where the seal 

 was taken, and the pollock in the immediate vicinity of the spot where the seal Avas 

 killed. 



In regard to the frequency with which the seals feed, little can be said, owing 

 to the impossibility of keeping track of any given seal. It is known that the bulls 

 come on shore late in May or early in June, and that they remain on the rookeries 



' Of course these may be eaten by fur seals, but there is not the least bit of evidence to show that 

 such IS the case, and since no remains are found in the stomachs of bachelors or on the rookeries, there 

 is, as yet, no reason to say that fur seals eat crabs. 



