🦭 Seal
Also known as: hooded seal, harp seal, Cystophora cristata
One of the fattiest milks in nature (around 60% and more in the hooded seal): the pup gains weight fast.
Seal is a marine mammal with flippers that lives in cold and temperate waters and nurses its pups with milk. Seals produce some of the fattiest milk in nature. The record holder is the hooded seal: it has the shortest lactation of any mammal, about four days, and its milk is more than 60% fat. In that time the pup almost doubles its weight, laying down fat directly in its blubber layer.
The short nursing period is linked to life on drifting ice: the ice is unreliable, and the mother hardly feeds while nursing, using up her own fat. Other seals have longer lactations — from several weeks to months — and lower milk fat, but it is still far higher than in land animals.
Harp seal pups in their white coats are known as whitecoats. After weaning, pups live for a while on their stored fat and then learn to find food on their own. Seal milk is not a food for humans.
How it connects to milk
Links
- What milk it gives
- 🥛 Seal milk
- What it gives
- 🥛 Milk
- Feeds with milk
- 🍼 Whitecoat
- Belongs to
- 🔬 Mammal
- What it contains
- 🧪 Milk fat
- Part of
- 🐾 Other mammals
Frequently asked questions
Which animal has the fattiest milk?
Seals are among the record holders — for example the hooded seal, whose milk is more than 60% fat.
How long do seals nurse their pups?
The hooded seal only about 3–5 days; other species from several weeks to several months.
What is a whitecoat seal?
The name for newborn harp seal pups with white fur.
Similar
🐋 Whale · 🐕 Dog · 🦔 Hedgehog · 🦘 Kangaroo · 🐈 Cat · 🐂 Musk ox
Sources
- NOAA Fisheries — Hooded Seal
- Extraordinary diversity of the pinniped lactation triad: lactation and growth strategies of seals, sea lions, fur seals, and walruses. Animal Frontiers, 2023