A seal clapping its flippers may not sound like a great revelation. Do an internet search for “clapping seal” and you’ll get a lot of hits. Ask a kid for their best seal impression, and odds are it will include a few hearty hand whacks.
But you won’t find any clapping pinnipeds — that’s seals, sea lions, and walruses — in Animal Behavior 101. Though it’s a trick easily taught to trained captive seals in zoos and aquariums, actual clapping has rarely been witnessed, and never recorded, in seals in the wild.
That is, until now. An international research team, led by scientists at Melbourne’s Monash University, published a paper this week in the journal Marine Mammal Science documenting the noteworthy observation.
