Freshly killed, then crunched: European carp are devoured with great gusto by long-nosed fur seals.
Sans table, sans table manners…
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Of course, as we made our return passage through the Goolwa Barrage lock, long-nosed fur seals were again present.
Both the youngster in the above photo and the young adult pictured below were in “postprandial” mode.
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The European carp which infest and degrade the Murray-Darling River system are disdained by most Australian human eaters of fish.
For a seal at Goolwa, however, a carp is a “highly-desirable, easily-caught meal”.
The recent “flood years” have flushed and funnelled umpteen millions of European carp through the Goolwa Barrage’s opened gates.
If long-nosed fur seals could speak English, they’d probably describe the Goolwa Barrage’s current hunting and dining “scene” as akin to “shooting fish in a barrel”.
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As regular readers would already know, the Coorong is one of our favourite places.
This series is the fruit of our most recent visit, on 13 March 2024.
In the wake of the 2022-23 floods – which produced the Murray-Darling river system’s biggest flows in many years – the Coorong was enjoying better overall “”health” than had been the case over the preceding several decades.
Most tourist visitors enter the Coorong via the Goolwa Barrage, where this series begins.
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As even the most cursory googler will discover almost instantly, “facts” and opinions concerning Namibia’s seal population and human “management” thereof are widely/wildly divergent/contested.
Suffice for now that all of Namibia’s seals are Cape Fur Seals, and that an enormous number (and major proportion of the global population) of them live and die on Namibia’s coast.
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