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Seals typically swallow their food whole, and will rip apart prey that is too big. [98] [99] The leopard seal, a prolific predator of penguins, is known to violently shake its prey to death. [100] Complex serrations in the teeth of filter-feeding species, such as crabeater seals, allow water to leak out as they swallow their planktonic food. [86]
The harbor (or harbour) seal (Phoca vitulina), also known as the common seal, is a true seal found along temperate and Arctic marine coastlines of the Northern Hemisphere. The most widely distributed species of pinniped (walruses, eared seals, and true seals), they are found in coastal waters of the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Baltic ...
Ringed seals are both predators and prey. A predator to zooplankton and fish, the ringed seal is considered a primary consumer as well as a secondary consumer. But the tertiary consumer, or top predator, in the Arctic is the polar bear, feeding mostly on seals, including the ringed seal.
The leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx), also referred to as the sea leopard, [3] is the second largest species of seal in the Antarctic (after the southern elephant seal). Its only natural predator is the orca. [4] It feeds on a wide range of prey including cephalopods, other pinnipeds, krill, fish, and birds, particularly penguins.
Elephant seals or sea elephants are very large, oceangoing earless seals in the genus Mirounga.Both species, the northern elephant seal (M. angustirostris) and the southern elephant seal (M. leonina), were hunted to the brink of extinction for lamp oil by the end of the 19th century, but their numbers have since recovered.
The only known natural predator of adult Baikal seals is the brown bear, but this is not believed to occur frequently. [1] The seal pups are typically hidden in a den, but can fall prey to smaller land predators such as the red fox, the sable and the white-tailed eagle. [4]
As top predators in the Southern Ocean, southern elephant seals inhabit one of the most sensitive and vulnerable regions to rapid climate change. Global efforts such as the Southern elephant seals as oceanographic samplers [ 43 ] and the Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole projects [ 44 ] have led to the collection of a large suite ...
Grey seals are vulnerable to typical predators for a pinniped mammal; their primary predator would be the orca or killer whale, but certain large species of sharks are known to prey on grey seals in North American waters, particularly great white sharks and bull sharks but also, upon evidence, additionally Greenland sharks. Some grey seal ...