A fur seal with separate subspecies in southern Africa and southern Australia. It lives at sea and comes ashore to breed.
Males are larger than females in both subspecies. Males of the Australian subspecies have a thick mane around the neck.
Adult females of the Australian fur seal subspecies dive to the seafloor to find prey while provisioning pups. At Kanowna Island, researchers fitted 22 adult females with cameras, GPS units and dive loggers and analysed 84.5 hours of footage gathered in autumn and winter between 2008 and 2018. Across 2,022 dives, they recorded 1,186 prey encounters and 715 captures.
Most footage came from dives over seafloor with sparse or sparse-medium cover by attached invertebrates, where encounters were also frequent; capture success in those two categories was 57.2% and 62.2%. Dense cover accounted for only 2.8% of recorded prey encounters, yet capture success there reached 79.3%, the highest value. Prey encounters increased with depth, and both encounters and captures were most frequent at night.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment (Arctocephalus pusillus)
The 2015 global IUCN assessment classified Brown fur seal as Least Concern (LC) and reported an increasing population trend. In New South Wales, the Australian subspecies (A. p. doriferus) is listed as Vulnerable under the state’s Biodiversity Conservation Act.