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A little while back, we went up to the Piedros Blancas / San Simeon elephant seal rookery. Elephant seals are AMAZING mammals in many ways with an incredibly fascinating lifecycle and ecology. Spending most of their lives alone out at sea, they congregate twice a year on coastal stretchesm hauling themselves onto the beaches, for moulting and mating/breeding. (It's actually a lot more complicated than "twice a year": different life stages have different cycles/periods, but all have two hauls).
When we headed up there, it was the tail end of the pupping season and so the beaches were full of females and pups hoarded by the local alpha males. While the pups were still being nursed at this time, fattened up on rich milk from their mothers, very soon --- just a month or so after birth --- they will be left on their own, as their mothers head off to sea toward Alaska to feed.
As I am sure you all have seen in dramatic documentary footage, the brief forays ashore during the hauls are brutal for many of then. But their solitary lives out at sea are not all that gentle either, at least some of the time, as they a preyed upon by orcas and sharks. And a variety of sharks at that, from great whites to cookie cutter sharks, the latter of whom do not actually kill the seals but take out neatly circular chunks from the bodies of the seals.
Where there is life, there is death, of course, and there was a (most likely) stillborn pup on the beach. This provided welcome sustenance for the equally amazing turkey vultures (best-smelling bird --- as in keenest sense of smell not in welcome aroma; sister to raptors? sister to storks?).
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