A leopard seal has spent the weekend asleep on Petone Beach, and by Sunday afternoon the Department of Conservation estimated that more than 150 people had wandered down the sand to look at it.
The animal hauled out on Saturday afternoon on a stretch of the Lower Hutt foreshore that doubles as an off leash dog walking area. DOC put up warning signs and set a perimeter around it, and onlookers built one of their own by laying driftwood across the sand to stop anyone drifting closer.
DOC ranger Melody McLaughlin told RNZ the crowd had behaved itself. “It’s so awesome to have animals like this come and visit us around New Zealand,” she said. “I really have to give a shoutout to people because they’ve been awesome. They’ve been really respectful, keeping space, giving the animal plenty of space.” She said “everybody yesterday and today that we have seen have had their dogs on leads”, which matters more than most beachgoers realise, because a leopard seal can severely injure or kill a dog that gets too close, particularly a small one.
“I think people just have to be aware these animals are apex predators,” McLaughlin said. “They are not afraid of moving objects coming in front of them.”
Nobody has tried to move the seal along. “He’s perfectly happy having the snooze on the beach here,” McLaughlin said, “and he will go when he’s good and ready to go back into the water.”
DOC gave much the same advice on Saturday, when the animal first drew a crowd. “Keep your distance, do not approach leopard seals and keep dogs on a lead – these animals need space and should return to the sea in a day or so,” the department told 1News. The official minimum distance is 20 metres.
Petone has done this before. A sub adult leopard seal about 2.5 metres long spent a day on the same beach on 8 September 2022, and locals built a driftwood barrier around that one too before it slipped away towards Somes Island. DOC biodiversity ranger David Moss said at the time that “leopard seals like this aren’t uncommon, with three or four showing up on Wellington beaches each year”. Last month a juvenile male about 1.7 metres long parked itself in a lane of the Sulphur Point boat ramp in Tauranga and the area was cordoned off for days until he was ready to leave.
What makes the Petone visitor more interesting than a large animal having a nap is that the paperwork on his species has changed twice in seven years, and the second change was a demotion.
Until 2019 the leopard seal was formally a vagrant in New Zealand, a species that turns up here by accident. That year an expert panel writing the Conservation status of New Zealand marine mammals, 2019 moved it up to At Risk and Naturally Uncommon. The reason given in the report was that the species had “long-term records from the subantarctic islands and the mainland, an increasing frequency of sightings on the mainland, and new evidence that the species is continuously present in New Zealand”. The panel noted there were fewer than 250 mature leopard seals in New Zealand at any one time, and that a handful of births had been recorded here, although every pup had died.
Then the panel changed its mind. In the 2024 assessment, published last year, leopard seals were moved back out of the At Risk categories and into Non resident Native and Migrant. “This change results from a re-evaluation against the updated NZTCS criteria for residency,” the report says. “There is no evidence of successful breeding of these seals in New Zealand, nor is there a large proportion of the global population resident here, therefore, the species is not considered resident.” Migrant was chosen over vagrant, the panel wrote, “based on evidence that more than 15 leopard seals visit New Zealand waters each year”.
So the animal on Petone Beach is officially a visitor again, not a local. That is a statement about breeding and about where the bulk of the world population lives rather than a claim that the seals have stopped coming. The bar for residency under the current rules is that a species either breeds here, or that more than a quarter of the global population spends more than half its life cycle in New Zealand waters. Leopard seals do neither. A 1977 estimate put the world population somewhere between 222,000 and 440,000, almost all of them around the Antarctic pack ice.
They are formidable animals. DOC says females reach about 3.6 metres and 500 kilograms and males about 3 metres and 300 kilograms, and that they are the only seals known to regularly hunt and kill warm blooded prey. The menu runs from krill through fish and squid to penguins, seabirds and other seals. A resting leopard seal on a Wellington beach is not hunting anything, but it is also not a sunbathing labrador, and the 20 metre rule exists for both the animal’s sake and the public’s.
The legal protection is real. Under the Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978 nobody may take a marine mammal without a permit, and the Act defines taking to include attracting, herding, harassing and disturbing the animal, not just killing or capturing it. Offences with no specific penalty attached carry a fine of up to $10,000.
Anyone who finds a leopard seal on a beach is asked to keep back, keep dogs on a lead, keep children close and call DOC on 0800 362 468. The department also runs a dedicated line on 0800 536 7273 for leopard seal sightings, because photographs of individual animals feed a national catalogue that researchers use to work out how many are coming, how often the same animals return, and how long they stay.
Every one of those sightings is a data point in an argument that has already flipped once. If the pattern of visits keeps building, the next expert panel may well have to look at the residency question again.
Have you seen a leopard seal on a New Zealand beach, and did people give it enough room? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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