A leopard seal chases a penguin in Antarctica. Photo: Amos Nahum
Humans are capable of monstrous things. Murder, rape, slavery – humanity shows amazing ingenuity when it comes to harming its own kind. Animals are better than us – they don’t fight among their own kind, and if they kill others, it’s for food. But even in the harsh world of animals, “nothing human is alien,” and they are also capable of creepy behavior.
They say that the most dangerous and cruel animal is man. But there are animals, faced with which in life, you can lose it. Many of them are considered harmless and even cause sympathy. However, if you imagine that you find yourself next to them in the sea, emotion can give way to primal fear.
Sea leopards
The sea leopard is the largest member of the seal family, with a total length of 2.4–3.5 m and a weight of 200 to 600 kg. This marine predator has a pronounced elongated and muscular body shape, has a massive head and powerful jaws.
The sea leopard is the only macro-predator seal that feeds on large animals such as seabirds, penguins, and other smaller pitchfork seals. Before killing his prey, he plays with it like a cat with a trapped mouse. This is the real king of Antarctica, terrifying to everyone, in whose place only killer whales can put.
Penguins
At the beginning of the 20th century, British explorer George Murray Levick and his team came across Adelie penguins during an expedition and were horrified. Levick described penguins as evil and unfeeling creatures. Penguins have a high incidence of sexual violence in the violent animal kingdom, regardless of the partner’s gender. Objects are even exposed to it.
A written story about the behavior of “cute birds” in the cruel world of animals so amazed the censors that they forbade its publication. According to Levick, male penguins tried to copulate with anything—the ground, other males, frozen corpses of females, and other objects. They also raped the females in large groups, crushing the eggs in the process.
Dolphins
Dolphins live in various seas of the world’s oceans and are perhaps the best adapted to the marine environment. Dolphins are considered by many to be wonderful creatures of remarkable intelligence and great kindness. This is partly true, but the mind sometimes plays tricks on them. We know cases when they were playing, they pushed people to the shore, thereby saving them. And how many cases were there when they pushed away from the shore?
Male dolphins are not harmless: they rape both their females and their neighbors in the territory. Bottlenose dolphins, for example, sometimes kill and torture porpoises – dolphin-like cetaceans – just for fun. They don’t eat them or try to drive them away, but just beat them and don’t let them breathe until they die.
Polar bears
Polar bear hunts seal
Yes, yes, that’s the umka… Only his mind is focused on his own survival, well, the females also have offspring. The polar bear is omnivorous, but feeds mainly on seals, which are clumsy on the ice. He attacks their defenseless cubs, because they do not leave the ice immediately after birth into the water. This is the owner of the Arctic, for whom theoretically only a meeting with a killer whale is dangerous, not counting people.
One of the ways these marine predators hunt is by ambushing holes in the ice, under which seals come up to breathe in the air. As soon as the seal emerges, the predator strikes with a swift and unexpected blow, grabs it with its paws and drags it onto the ice floe. He attacks baby walruses and belugas, and even kills his own cubs if they interfere with his courting of a female during the rut.
Sea otters
Sea otters are the most charming creatures that swim on their backs, amusingly folding their paws on their stomachs. However, this impression is somewhat dispelled when it comes to mating. In the cruel world of animals, male sea otters behave extremely aggressively during sex, painfully biting the females.
If the females are not around, they try to find someone who could replace them – for example, other male sea otters or other sea creatures. There have been cases where sea otters raped and killed seal pups who were unlucky enough to be nearby.
Killer whales
Killer whales are bloodthirsty marine predators, they hunt seals and even sharks, but they practically do not attack humans. Killer whales also hunt their relatives, other cetaceans. According to the stories of the Canadian Inuit, they hunt bowhead whales, which are much larger than them, narwhals and belugas.
A bowhead whale is drowned by a team of killer whales, preventing it from rising to the surface or closing its blowhole. Killer whales can beat a whale with their tail, trying to break its ribs and actually eat it alive by biting its belly. They do the same with narwhals and belugas, but they try to attack female and baby narwhals and not touch male narwhals, which can injure them with their horn.
If a large hungry killer whale happens to encounter a polar bear in the sea, then the bear will have no chance in a fight in the water. Moreover, the polar bear is a lone hunter, and killer whales attack in groups. Therefore, the emperor killer whale is the most formidable marine predator.
By Sergey Yevtushenko
