Neil the Elephant Seal Becomes Local Celebrity and Menace in Southern Tasmania

Bollards, traffic cones, fences and LandCruisers stand little chance against a 1-tonne giant known as Neil the seal, now a local legend in southern Tasmania.

Neil – a five-year-old elephant seal – has once again taken up residence in Tasmanian towns. He’s bypassing barricades, crushing fences, lying on roads and bashing into at least one parked car.

In short, he’s acting like an unruly teenager, play-fighting with seal stand-ins.

“He’s probably not the fastest mover, but if he runs into a car or decides to put his nose up on the bonnet, it’s not going to be too good,” says Rod Macdonald, the mayor of Tasman council, which covers the area where Neil was born in 2020.

“[But] he’s certainly been a bit of a celebrity, and he continues to earn his status.”

As the independent Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie puts it, he’s “the only bloke in Tasmania who can stop traffic, ignore everyone, and still be loved for it”.

Dr Jane Younger, a senior lecturer and seal expert at the University of Tasmania, says Neil is just engaging in “normal seal behaviours”.

“He’s come back every year since he’s been born, but he’s bigger now,” Younger says.

“He’s like 1,000 kilos at this point, and he’s obviously more capable of being a menace. He’s broken fences, he’s harassing people’s cars – that’s just a function of his size.”

Younger says he is only set to grow.

“The adult males are routinely more than 2 tonnes, the larger ones around three-and-a-half tonnes,” she says. “So he could get much, much bigger than he is now.”

Elephant seals are social creatures when they’re on land, usually living in vast colonies during moulting and mating seasons.

While most of the Australian populations live on Macquarie and Heard islands, thousands of kilometres south, Younger suspects Neil is likely the progeny of a young, inexperienced seal who ventured to Tasmania by mistake.

Dr Clive McMahon, a marine ecologist who has worked with elephant seals for three decades, says Neil is on land for one of several “haul outs” that the creatures make each year. Neil appears to have come for a social visit and is likely to be around for six weeks or so. He’s meant to encounter other young males, have some interaction and rest on shore.

“When he would normally encounter young males, they would spar with him, they would be training and … preparing themselves for when they’re adults,” says McMahon, a science and operations manager at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

“[But] in the absence of other young males … he sort of has to learn his fighting behaviour or his social behaviours by doing things like sparring with bollards and traffic cones and various other things.”

Without those other young males, Neil is probably quite lonely.

“Unfortunately, poor old Neil, he’s probably looking for some of those things and is not really finding them,” he adds, noting elephant seals will often sleep in large clumps, squished up against each other.

“Often when you see him sleeping, you’ll see him squished up against a fence, and that’s probably part of him wanting to feel that there’s something else there.”

Beyond Neil, elephant seals are facing some dire threats. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which monitors species’ population numbers, recently decided to upgrade the southern elephant seal to “vulnerable”.

The body made the shift after a wave of bird flu tore through four out of five major populations. In some colonies, more than 90% of seal pups died, including 13,000 on Heard Island alone.

Macdonald says residents tend to make do when Neil hauls himself into town, working out a way “to not get into too much trouble with him”.

“Because of his size now, he’s a bit of a danger to damaging things,” he says.

Wildlife officials have urged people to say 20 metres away from Neil at all times, even if he’s sleeping. Those with dogs should stay 50 metres away.

McMahon says Tasmanians should embrace Neil’s visits to Australia.

“If we love seeing Neil, why not look after Neil’s environment and ensure that his environment is safe,” he says.

“I guess what I’m saying is, us as humans should really embrace the fact that we have the privilege to learn as much as we can about elephant seals, and also about the ocean.”