Fur seal and bellowsfish face off

It looks like a scene from a Disney movie, right? But this unusual encounter off Sydney Heads is not what it seems.

TWAM 19 Sep 2015

Bet you’re thinking, Awww, isn’t that sweet. It looks like a scene from a Disney movie, right? You can imagine the seal saying “Hello, little fellas!” and the fish responding with excited, high-pitched chirruping. But alas, this isn’t a Disney movie, and the seal ain’t saying hello. In fact, it’s killing and eating these fish one by one – and taking its damn time about it.

Mark Seabury had spent the morning chasing whales in his trailer boat 25km off Sydney Heads – he loves to photograph the humpbacks and their calves migrating south every spring – and was heading back home with a seasick deckhand when they chanced upon this bizarre encounter. Somehow, the solitary fur seal had driven this school of common bellowsfish – a deep-water species that’s found at depths down to 500m – up to the surface and corralled them into a tight bunch, ready for the killing.

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Seabury dived in and watched for an hour, mesmerised by the seal’s skill and balletic grace. “He would circle the baitball, driving it tighter and tighter, then suddenly burst through the centre of it and emerge from the other side with a fish in his mouth. Every minute, one of them would cop it like this – but the school had nowhere to go.” In the absence of any competition the seal was totally unhurried, he says.

The 47-year-old father of two works as an emergency electrician for a large energy company – he’s the guy they call on when a street or suburb suffers a power outage – and lives in North Sydney, but the ocean has always been his second home. If it wasn’t for his seasick mate’s hankering for dry land, he wouldn’t have left this scene at all. “The seal was still picking the fish off when we went,” Seabury says. “I often wonder, how long did it keep going? Did it eat every last one of them?”