Last fortnight there were in captivity just two sea elephants, both in Germany. One day in the Hanover Zoo, four-ton Goliath III sighed through his dewlap snout and died. Forty-eight hours later in the Berlin Zoo, Roland flipped up his toenails, sagged his small head into his mountainous jowls and died too.
Goliath and Roland were Southern Sea Elephants or Elephant Seals (Mirunga patagonica), an immensely overgrown genus of seal whose adult males grow a short, useless proboscis. They breed on lonely southern islands, the Falklands off South America, Kerguelen off the Cape of Good Hope, the Macquaries off Australia, commute to the Antarctic ice pack. On the breeding beaches they flip sand on their backs and sleep, not to be disturbed even by man. Lazy and languid bulls fight with none of the ferocity of smaller seals. Delivered alive at a zoo, they fetch from $5,000 to $10,000 apiece, eat about 150 lb. of fresh fish a day. Goliath, not a circus sea elephant him self, bore a great circus name. Goliath I and II were famed troupers for Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus (TIME. April 18, 1932). Goliath III was last seen in the U. S. on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. Because he ate too much to show his promoters a profit, he was shipped last July to the Hanover Zoo. Roland was originally a little smaller (three tons) than Goliath. For years he has been wasting slowly away. Lately he had begun to lose 10 lb. a day and to turn up a face of monstrous grief, one eye closed, the other alert and blue (see cut). Last week Berlin Zoogoers attributed Roland’s death to a heart broken by loneliness. Berlin doctors, however, set about knifing through a hide as thick as a truck tire for some more realistic reason for his demise.
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