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. 2018 Apr 18;5(4):172393. doi: 10.1098/rsos.172393

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© 2018 The Authors.

Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Figure 4. — Phocine seals curl their digits so that the strong claws can be used to effectively grip prey during processing. (a) Female harbour seal (Phoca vitulina, PV11) using both forelimbs together to grip prey. The long claws can clearly be seen piercing the skin. This processing attempt was unsuccessful because the seal was trying to tear the whole fish, rather than focussing on pulling off a smaller piece. (b) Male harbour seal (PV84) showing a more typical processing posture: the teeth grip a small piece of flesh, while the forelimbs pull the main bulk of the prey item away from the mouth. (c) Spotted seal (Phoca largha, PL16) holding prey between its teeth and forelimbs just before commencing a processing attempt. See electronic supplementary material, movie S1, for the footage of these feeding events.