Antarctic fur seal

How it lives

It spends most of its time at sea and comes ashore to breed. Males take beach territories in October or November, and females arrive from late November to early January. Each female has a single pup after a pregnancy of about 8 to 9 months and nurses it for about 4 months. Mothers feed at sea for about 3 to 5 days, travelling up to 150 to 240 km, then return to nurse. Females usually dive to about 30 m for around 4 minutes, with the deepest recorded dive about 180 m. Males are aggressive during the breeding season.

Where it goes

It breeds on sub-Antarctic islands, from about 61 degrees south to the Antarctic Convergence, including South Georgia, the South Orkney and South Shetland Islands, Bouvet, Marion, Crozet, Kerguelen, Heard and Macquarie. It feeds at sea around these islands. Winter routes are not described in the sources I read.

We only draw a journey on the map when scientists have tracked it or clearly documented it. For this animal we have not found one yet.

Populations

Global: Endangered (IUCN, April 2026), moved up from Least Concern. Mature seals fell by more than half, from about 2,187,000 in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025. IUCN links this to warming seas, less sea ice and krill moving to deeper water, and notes that pups at South Georgia now survive their first year far less often. More than 95 percent of the breeding is at South Georgia. Sealing in the 1700s and 1800s left only hundreds to a few thousand animals, and the species then recovered under protection. Entanglement in marine debris is also a known problem.