Welcome and a note re: species list

Welcome everyone and thanks for your observations and identifications. It's great that people have recorded three vagrant species in SA waters, but there's a lingering problem with the Arctocephalus genus. I lack the expertise to separate the Long-nose fur seals from the Australian (brown) fur seals, so there is likely to be some misidentification among records here. Experts advise me that they also struggle working from photographs alone.

If anyone has a reliable way of telling one species from the other, that would be wonderful. Long-nose fur seals are far more abundant in SA. There is only one breeding colony of Australian fur seals in SA, on the Casuarina Islets off Kangaroo island's south-western tip, so an observer is far less likely to encounter A. pusillus than they are A. forsteri.

Posted on December 1, 2021 03:09 AM by danimations