What can an elephant seal – a 4,000 pound, bellowing monstrosity that looks like a melted Yankee Candle – teach us about the world?

Plenty, it turns out.

“The animals are amazing. I mean, everything they do is extreme,” says Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “They’re the deepest-diving pinniped and they dive for longer than any other seal or sea lion. They also fast for longer. Everything they do is just pushing the limits.”

In the Bay Area, one of the best places to observe elephant seals is Año Nuevo State Park in San Mateo County. The first stop is usually the visitor center, which used to be a creamery, and is filled with fun seal facts like “northern elephant seals spend up to 10 months of the year at sea” and that their favorite foods in

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