Seals are semi–aquatic mammals with a sleek, barrel–like body and fins. With their big, brown eyes and appealing dog-like faces, seals are attractive creatures. They live all over the world, from the frozen wastes of the polar regions, to the tropical beaches.

Seals are warm–blooded animals i.e, their body temperature remains constant regardless of the outside temperature. All seals have a layer of blubber under the skin that acts as an insulator against the cold. Sea lions, which are generally found in warmer climates than other seals, have little additional protection.

Earless seals, on the other hand, have a circulatory system that limits the quantity of blood that flows through the skin and thus reduces the amount of body heat lost from the skin. The fur seals, in addition to blubber, have a two–layer covering of fur. The upper layer consists of coarse guard hairs; the dense lower layer is made up of short, fine hairs and acts as an additional insulator.

Seals have large, roundish eyes that in some species are huge in proportion to the size of the skull. The eyes have thick, spherical lenses that enable the seals to see well under water. Unlike most other mammals, seals do not have tear ducts. Thus when seals are observed on land they look as though they are crying because their tears run out of the eye onto the face. Seals have rather long whiskers around the mouth.

The seals quickly learn every time the trainer rewards them Animals, like people, learn at different rates, and there is no set time for learning and training certain behaviors. One thing that helps trainers teach animals is discovering what an animal finds reinforcing. A reinforce is anything that increases the frequency of behavior.

We can also employ a few training tools that make the job easier, the main one being the whistle you see around a trainer's neck. When we first start training seals, we pair the sound of the whistle with fish. So each time they get a fish they hear the whistle and soon begin to realize that the whistle means a good thing is coming.

You might be wondering how giving a seal a fish or treat when they do the right thing can end up with the seal performing a leap out of the water? Well, all such behaviors are broken down into tiny little steps we call ‘approximations’. Before we start any new behavior we break it up into smaller steps and introduce all these steps individually and then piece it together at the end. The final demonstration by the seals you see in a show may have taken months, or even years, to learn.

The most common question we get asked as trainers, is why we train our seals. The main, and most important, reason is it allows us to provide them with proper care on a daily basis. We call this ‘training for animal husbandry’ or ‘cooperative care’.

We can train our seals to do numerous things including opening their mouths, allowing us to brush their teeth, and lying down and rolling over, allowing us to inspect their whole body. We can also train our seals to keep them constantly challenged and stimulated, as well as for research and to demonstrate to our visitors their amazing natural behaviors and abilities.

Seals have the capability to extract information on the shape of the seafloor –– known as bathymetry.

As a part of seal training, seals diving deep in the ocean for food near Antarctica are helping provide extremely accurate data for use in mapping the seafloor. The new work with elephant seals is the first to extract information on the shape of the seafloor –– known as bathymetry –– from new sensors, glued to the animals heads, which can measure pressure and hence depth. Seals have helped oceanographers before, as scientists have glued sensors to the animals bodies that measures factors like temperature and salinity.

As the seals swim, the tags record information every few seconds, then relay it via satellite once the seals surface. About 30 percent of the time seals dive all the way to the bottom to forage for food, so by studying enough dives for each animal –– about 200,000 dives in all –– researchers can create a map of the sea floor. And the seals do it all for a fraction of the cost of traditional seafloor mapping done from ships.