History and Present Status of the Northern Elephant Seal Population

Numerous terrestrial and marine species, like the northern elephant seal, experienced great population reductions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the single remarkable fact about the history of the northern elephant seal population is that despite only narrowly averting extinction, it rebounded with an unparalleled, century-long period of exponential increase (see, e.g., Reeves, Stewart, and Leatherwood 1992 and McCullough and Barrett 1992 for reviews of trends in pinnipeds and other vertebrates). Here we briefly review the population reduction and document its impressive recovery. We focus on number of births as an index of growth during the past three decades