Playful growling possums, chilling capybaras, and now sneezing seals videos for your enjoyment. The cuteness code collides with audio adorability in this video of seals clearing their nasal passages while their bodies rise and shift with sound vibrations. The short video that is already on a loop sounds like the opening to a Pink Floyd song.
Katrina Oconnell proposes that maybe the sound is a medical condition: "It's called Sleep Apnea, the elephant seal has to snort and sneeze to keep nostrals [sic] open…"
Oconnell is onto something, as recently reported research from Science reveals that seals nap while diving. "Using advanced remote monitoring techniques, Kendall-Bar et al. found that wild northern elephant seals can sleep for less than 2 hours per day at sea and do so while diving to depths of around 300 meters. Unlike other marine mammals, they enter full REM sleep, with accompanying paralysis, but they do so at depths below those occupied by their predators."
In the video, there is a white discharge when the seals sneeze. There is a scientific reason for white pulmonary surfactant discharged during a sneeze that is vital for the seal's survival as the substance makes "non-stick lungs."
As The Common Naturalist explains, this white surfactant "is the remarkable substance that makes it possible for elephant seals to survive dives that exceed the estimated collapse-depth of a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine. When an elephant seal makes an extremely deep dive, its lungs collapse under the immense ambient pressure. Their respiratory tissues all begin to compress and the alveoli are smashed together into a tighter and tighter space as the seal's lungs buckle and fold. When the animal heads back to the surface, that process reverses, and it's the unique white-colored surfactant that makes that rapid, seemingly effortless re-expansion possible."
Ocean Conservation Namibia primarily posts videos of wonderful humans freeing marine animals from nets and other debris discarded in the oceans. This particular post is of a sneezing baby seal. I might make this my ringtone.
