The number of breeding elephant seals that find refuge on the shores of Point Reyes exploded this year, with numbers climbing from 1,844 in 2017 to 2,524. Despite the effort by park service employees to reduce breeding activity on the most public part of Drakes Beach, the site only rose in popularity for the seals. “The seals have discovered that Drakes Bay has relatively calm waters compared to other parts of the seashore,” said Dave Press, the Point Reyes National Seashore’s wildlife ecologist and acting chief of natural resources. “As the population is expanding, most of the increases we are seeing are along Drakes Beach. Over the last five to eight years, the numbers are exploding.” In 2017, only about one-fifth of the seashore’s elephant seal cows had chosen to haul up and birth their pups at Drakes Beach; this year, around half did. Two years ago, during a government shutdown that closed the park to visitors, a large number of seals took refuge directly adjacent to the parking lot. Since then, in order to avoid conflicts with visitors, ecologists have tried to haze pregnant females further down the beach, though they leave seals alone once they give birth. This year, with 63 pups close to the visitor center, the park was forced to close the entire beach from January through March. Northern elephant seals were absent from the area for more than 150 years, but they returned to Point Reyes in the early 1970s. Between 1988 and 1993, the population grew at a dramatic annual rate of 32 percent; since 1993, the growth rate has slowed to 8 to 9 percent a year. Besides Point Reyes, the seals haul out in just a few sites in the state, including the Farallon Islands, Piedras Blancas, Año Nuevo and the Channel Islands. Males come south from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and females come east from Hawaii, making appearances in places like Point Reyes in the winter. The seals typically spend 80 percent of their lives in the ocean. Researchers from the seashore, Point Blue Conservation Science and the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently quantified dispersal rates among elephant seal colonies, studying tagging data collected from the four sites. They found that seals are highly loyal to their birthplace: Less than 2 percent bred in a location other than where they were born. Only 11 percent of the juveniles born at Point Reyes had joined other colonies. The ecological impact of the increasing population of seals, which consume squid, fish, rays and sharks, has not yet been studied locally. “Since they feed on deep-sea fish, they don’t have much competition,” seashore marine ecologist Sarah Codde said. “But I do know that in recent years, some satellite-tagged females have been migrating farther than they have before, and one possible reason could be due to their increasing population and needing to find more food. But it could also be due to warming ocean temperatures and their prey moving or having impacted numbers. The reasons are still unknown.”