A southern elephant seal settled in for a long nap near Ukraine’s Akademik Vernadsky Antarctic station on Galindez Island, and researchers caught it on video.
The National Antarctic Scientific Centre published the footage, which shows the animal resting with its eyes closed, occasionally opening them before shutting them again.
Researchers noted that on land these animals typically choose a shoreline for sleep and can snore for around ten hours at a stretch.
Their sleeping habits in water are strikingly different. According to the scientific centre, elephant seals fall asleep at the ocean surface, then roll upside down and begin to sink in a slow spiral, descending to depths of more than 300 metres and sometimes reaching the seafloor. Scientists believe this behaviour helps the animals avoid predators such as killer whales, which hunt mainly near the surface. The seals then rise to breathe and repeat the cycle, accumulating roughly two hours of sleep per day in this way.
The centre credited that finding to research on northern elephant seals conducted by scientists from the University of California. It noted that the southern elephant seals living in Antarctica are considerably larger than their northern relatives and are the biggest seals in the world, with adults reaching six metres in length and up to five tonnes in weight.
The animal in the video is a juvenile, the researchers said, and it is young teenagers like this one that most often wander over to rest near the Akademik Vernadsky station.
