Friendly Seal goes hunting
November 30, 2025
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
The Harbor seals who live in my nearby bays sometimes employ a feeding strategy easily visible from shore. I call it shore-feeding since it depends on proximity to land. The seals are feeding on very small fish, likely surf smelt, a schooling species that is typically less than six inches long but it appears to be worth their while to hunt them.
What they are doing underwater to catch the little fish is something I have to imagine but studies have shown that harbor seals literally hoover them up. 85% of the time they use suction, pulling a fish into their pursed mouth and then closing their mouth forcing as much water out as possible. Sometimes they’ll bite down on a fish. That’s more typical with big fish and octopus. If you want to see what the suction method looks like, there are underwater slow-motion clips in this study: Comparative feeding strategies and kinematics in phocid seals: suction without specialized skull morphology.
Look how close to shore she got on this other occasion.
Here’s how shore-feeding works. First, a seal herds a school of fish toward shore. I can tell that’s going on by the roiling sea surface about 30-40 feet offshore, usually in a corner of a bay. Then the seal powers in toward shore or parallels the beach, trapping the fish between air, land and the bottom of the bay. Hoovering up fish and swallowing them takes place underwater. In less than a minute, the seal surfaces and circles back out. It’s not unusual for them to repeat the maneuver.
I can show you a sequence of what I saw a couple days ago on a beautiful sunny late afternoon. The day was windless so the water’s surface was flat, making it easy to see where the seal was.
A seal swam by, cruising through the golden reflections of rock, grasses and winter trees on the nearby headland. I couldn’t tell at the time who it was, but later in examining my photos I identified her as Friendly Seal by her markings.
Slipping silently through the calm water
The circled white marking in that location is what I refer to as the “wrench spot”, which FS has had since I first met her
She dived, and I saw nothing of her for several minutes as I watched the water swirling around in the corner of the bay to my right. I took video of that, which is posted below, about 2 minutes. During most of it all the action is underwater but you can follow it by the ripples on the surface. At the end there was a surprise for me!
(Note: the noise is a couple of cars that went by behind me, plus some killdeer and a begging gull).
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The surprise: TWO seals came up! Besides FS, the other is one of the two Little White Seals who lounge on the dock with her. When their heads popped up they saw me on the beach close by. They were also watching a walker who went by on the road behind me. She’s a neighbor who walks her dog every day at this time. You notice how interested Friendly Seal is in the dog. She’s always shown a fascination for dogs going by.
Friendly Seal watching me as I watch her
Now she’s watching the dog
Friendly Seal spends a great deal of time here and in the neighboring local bay. There are no salmon in these very shallow waters, so she’s hunting whatever does live here.
Seals often get a bad rap from fishermen who are convinced declining salmon numbers are due to predation by marine mammals like seals. That is scapegoating since the real reason for the decline in salmon is overfishing, dams, habitat loss and climate change. In reality, seals, like most marine mammals, are opportunistic feeders, meaning they hunt whatever is most abundant. When there’s a big salmon run, they’ll eat salmon, but most of the time they eat other prey. There’s plenty of field research to show that, including scat studies. For a quantitative description of Harbor seal diet in the Salish Sea, the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound, Harbor Seal article has specifics.
Surf smelt
The seals in my local bays might be feeding on any of the schooling forage fish — herring, sand lance, surf smelt — but since these beaches are documented smelt spawning sites, and smelt tend to stay in shallow water near where they spawned, it’s likely they are what the seals are finding so abundant. Friendly Seal has been finding ample prey in these bays for the past twelve years I’ve known her. She’s usually nearby. In recent years several other seals have been hanging out in these bays too, and as we saw in the video, participating in shore-feeding. I like to think maybe the other seals, in particular the Little White Seals, could be Friendly Seal’s offspring and she has taught them the strategy. Whether or no, these local seals are finding plenty to eat.
🍁
Rained all day yesterday. Showery, breezy and cool today in the PNW islands. Temps in 30s and 40s.
What’s up in nature in your neighborhood today?
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