Molly McCormley at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA--As the females nurse their pups, they slowly become skinner and skinner until they look like a completely different seal! Females loose about 35 percent of their body weight during the breeding season! These are the skinny females! 

 Ashley Pearson at Año Nuevo State Reserve, CA-- If you went to Año Nuevo every day for a week, do you think you could start to tell individual seals from one another?  Although we can tell some seals apart using physical attributes, genetically speaking, northern elephant seals are all almost identical!  Northern e seals are so similar genetically, that it is hard to identify who fathered a pup – even with a  paternity test!