Gruesome Meal: Seagulls Snack on Baby Seals' Eyeballs

Gull approaches a sleeping seal pup. — A kelp gull approaches a sleeping juvenile seal on the beach at Pelican Point in Namibia.

(Image credit: Naude Dreyer)

Hungry seagulls on the coast of Namibia have a gruesome way of snacking: they peck out and consume the eyeballs of baby seals, according to a new study.

But that's not the only strange eating habit these birds have, the researchers said. The kelp gull (Larus dominicanus) has also been observed pecking skin and blubber off adult and juvenile whales in South America. And in Chile, the birds supplement their seafood diet with a real delicacy: olives.

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The scientists recorded about 500 eye-pecking attacks over the course of the 15-year observational study, and about half of those attacks were "successful," according to the researchers. A successful attack started when a gull approached a newborn seal that had wandered away from its mother or when the gull happened upon a sleeping juvenile seal. Then, the gull went for the creature's eyes — rapidly pecking at the ocular region in an attempt to pluck out the animal's eyeballs and eat them.

But eyeball-eating didn't signal the end of the attack, the researchers said. After consuming the seal's eyes, successful gulls pecked the bodies of the chubby baby seals, going for the soft, exposed regions of the underbelly and anus. Usually, other gulls would see the carnage and join in the meal, the researchers found. But there is good news: sometimes the baby seals escaped, at times receiving help from a larger, seagull-biting adult seal.

The kelp gull's taste for seal meat may be a new trend, but it's also possible that these birds have been plucking out seal eyeballs for a long time and no one ever noticed before, Gallagher told Live Science in an email. As to why the seagulls do this, Gallagher said the reason is likely very simple: Seals are plentiful, fish are not, and gulls go for the meal that's easier to find. [Gallery: Seals of the World]

A similar story is unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as well. Off the coast of Argentina's Valdes Peninsula, right whale adults and their young are under constant attack by kelp gulls, a species whose population in that region has tripled in size since the 1980s, according to Victoria Rowntree, a research associate professor in the biology department at the University of Utah, who was not involved with the new study.

But in the early 1980s, a graduate student studying whales off the Valdes Peninsula in Patagonia (a nursery ground for southern right whales) noticed that some of the gulls also pecked at the whales as they breached, leaving small holes in the animals' backs. As the whales raised their young over the next several months, the gulls would continue these attacks, pecking at the original holes to reach the nutrient-rich blubber under the skin until the holes widened into large lesions.

The gulls' feeding behavior has gotten progressively more aggressive through the decades, Rowntree said. However, some adult whales have adapted their behavior to ward off their avian attackers. Female right whales now arch their backs when surfacing for a breath in such a way that the birds can't peck through their skin, she said. But this modified breaching behavior caused another problem, Rowntree added, because the thwarted gulls began pecking at baby whales that are too naïve to mimic mom's breach.