Leopard Seal Discovers The Hard Way That Nature Photographers Lack Basic Survival Skills

Via Neatorama, a story and video being conveyed by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen in the context of his new photography book. Nicklen was in the Antarctic doing some filming and got “adopted” by a 12-foot leopard seal, which tried to feed him and teach him how to hunt. Twelve feet is a little over three and a half meters for our European audience, which is in turn “way too effing big to approach” for our rational non-crazy-photographer audience. Cute! Stupefyingly scary. But cute!

I slipped into the water, terrified of what might happen, and I swam up to this leopard seal. My legs were shaking and I had dry mouth. Right away she dropped the penguin. She came up to me and she opened her mouth… and her head is twice as wide as a grizzly bear’s head. She’s huge. She took my whole… camera inside her head and did this threat display… But then the most remarkable thing happen. She went off and got me a live penguin. She came up and she started to feed me a penguin. She kept letting these live penguins go and the penguin would shoot past me and she’d look disgusted as she go by me. She did this over and over.

And then I think she realized that I was this useless predator in her ocean, probably going to starve to death and I think she became quite panicked and she got me weak penguins then dead penguins …

We can relate. The number of times we’ve tried to teach scruffy nature photographers to fend for themselves, only to have to buy them happy hour appetizers because they maxed out their credit cards on an awesome new lens… what we’re saying is that this is not a sub-species of homo sapien that’s good at finding or acquiring sustenance. So we can sympathize with the frustration of this well-meaning seal:

We actually used to have a cat like that. First she started off with a month of bringing half-living birds to the household toddler at 6am every morning, which she would release in the bed and let them fly around the room. When that didn’t work – on account of how human toddlers make awful predators – she would get disgusted and leave. Then she switched to half a year of intermittently leaving piles of dead bugs in the doorway. The difference between the cat and this leopard seal, of course, is that the cat was just doing it for fun because it likes to kill things. Never trust cats.