Elephant Seals Have an Internal GPS They Use for Migration

Elephant seals have a sense that functions like an internal GPS to guide their migration to their breeding beaches each year, according to researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz.

What to Know

• Pregnant female elephant seals spend 240 days each year foraging over thousands of miles across the Eastern North Pacific Ocean before returning to their home beaches to give birth.

• The elephant seals venture as much as 10,000 kilometers from their breeding beaches but seem have an internal map sense, knowing exactly how far away they are from where they need to go and when to head back home.

• The elephant seals give birth within 5 days of their arrival back to their home beaches.

• Satellite tracking of 100 female elephant seals showed that they returned to the same beaches year after year with very little variation in migration arrival and departure dates.

• The elephant seals travel independently, each covering diversely different areas at sea with dramatically different daily routines, but all share the same instinct to return home a few days before birth.

This is a summary of the article “Elephant Seals Time Their Long-distance Migrations Using a Map Sense,” published by Cell Press on February 28. The full article can be found on Current Biology.

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