Seal

Overview

Seals are shaped by one asymmetry. On land they are laboured; in water they are transformed. It is worth resisting the assumption that the land version is the real one.

They have nothing to do with selkies. Selkies do exist in the world, but none of us is one, and if that ever changed the entry would say selkie rather than seal — they are a separate and distinct thing, not a reading of what a seal is.

Physical traits

The body is fusiform, tapering at both ends, with the limbs reduced to flippers and much of the propulsion coming from lateral sweeps of the hind flippers and lower body.

True seals differ from sea lions and fur seals in two ways: no external ear flaps, and hind flippers that cannot rotate forward beneath the body. The second is the consequential one. A sea lion can walk on land; a seal cannot, and moves by hauling and undulating instead.

Insulation is chiefly blubber rather than fur, which is the reverse of the otter’s arrangement and allows for far deeper and colder water.

The vibrissae are exceptional. Seal whiskers detect hydrodynamic trails — the disturbance a fish leaves behind — well after the fish itself has gone.

Diving physiology is equally extreme: heart rate drops sharply, blood is shunted to the vital organs, and oxygen is stored in muscle myoglobin rather than the lungs.

Magic

The species fixes nothing. Some seals are tied to magic heavily and some barely at all, and what form it takes is their own.

Shared instincts

Seals carry a real instinct toward being gregarious ashore while foraging alone at sea. How social any given seal actually is varies by individual, as it does everywhere else in this guide.

Playfulness is not a species trait. Many seals have it and many do not, and it belongs to the individual rather than to seals as a whole.

Where the name comes from

True seals (Phocidae) are found across most of the world’s oceans, with maternal investment that is compressed and intense — the hooded seal weans its pup in about four days, the shortest lactation of any mammal. Elephant seals routinely dive past two thousand metres and can stay down over an hour.

Field notes

Individual colouring, markings, size and magic belong on each member’s own page.