Isabel Gottlieb- Elephant Seals Mug

Dimensions: 4"h x 5"w (w handle) x 3.5"d, 14 oz

Ceramic mug, fully functional. Stoneware fired to cone 6 in an electric kiln

For one of my pieces for this show, I wanted to highlight a conservation success story. If you’ve ever spent time on the California coast, I hope that you’ve had the joy of witnessing piles and piles of Northern elephant seals making fantastic blub blub noises and loafing around on the beach like a bunch of real life Jabba the Huts. You’d never guess it based on their ubiquity today, but the Northern elephant seal was presumed to be extinct in 1884. People hunted these massive seals for their blubber oil (males can weigh over 4,000 lbs, and can be about 50% blubber at the start of the breeding season) throughout the 1800’s, until we thought we had hunted literally all of them. Luckily, in 1892 a remnant population was discovered to have survived - fewer than 100 individuals on Guadalupe Island, in Mexico. The Mexican government protected the Northern elephant seal, and then the American government followed suit. It turns out that all they needed to thrive was for us to stop killing them (gee!) - the species has made a truly remarkable recovery and today there are over 220,000 individuals along the west coast of North America from Mexico all the way up to Alaska.

Northern elephant seals spend much of their lives at sea, but return to the beaches around the new year to party (aka breed and birth). The bulls wave their gigantic noses at each other (and also fight) to establish/maintain territories and accumulate harems of up to 100-ish females with whom they can mate. They do not eat during the breeding season (up to 3 months for males, usually more like 5 weeks for females while nursing their pups) and can lose over 1/3 of their body weight during this time.

50% of the proceeds from this mug will be donated to the National Parks Foundation.  To learn more about their work please visit https://www.nationalparks.org/

To see more of Isabel's creations be sure to follow on Instagram @buteostudio