February 2, 2015 — Long thought to be fish-eaters, the big-eyed animals have been observed taking on bigger prey in the North Sea.
It seemed a heart-warming sight: two seals apparently frolicking in the sea before slipping below the waves off the German island of Helgoland (map) in 2013.
Then an ominous sheet of red unfurled across the waves. When the pair resurfaced, the bigger seal was skinning and eating its companion. (Also see "Did Grey Seals Mutilate Two Harbour Porpoises?")
"We thought they were playing," says marine biologist Sebastian Fuhrmann of the environmental consulting firm IBL-Umweltplanung, whose photos of the killing of a young harbor seal will appear in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of Sea Research. "It looked really cute, but in just a few seconds, it was over."
The triumphant hunter of the harbor seal was, astonishingly, a gray seal. These soulful-eyed animals have long been thought to subsist on lowly creatures such as cod. But now the gray seal seems to be morphing into the most murderous killer of the southern North Sea.
New eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence have implicated the sumo wrestler-size marine mammals in the bloody mutilation and death of harbor seals and harbor porpoises across the region. Some of the latter apparently succumb after being ambushed and held underwater until they suffocate. (Watch a video of harbor seals hunting under the waves.)
Read the full story at National Geographic