1 Fur seals and sea lions are restricted to the Bering Strait area and seldom enter icy waters.

2 Exploitation of the region first depleted it of fur seals and whales; now the same fate threatens fish and krill.

3 The fur seal may have up to a hundred, but the Hamadryas makes do with only a handful.

4 No further sightings of the fur seal were reported until the early 90s.

5 A young fur seal forages amid bull kelp near Gansbaai, South Africa.

6 A Falkland Islands fur seal perches on a rock outcrop off New Island, where seafood-rich waters nourish a wildlife population diverse in nature and often astonishing in number.

7 A young Cape fur seal forages amid bull kelp near Gansbaai, South Africa.

8 The male fur seal is much larger than the female.

9 Fur seal populations here have rebounded to merely modest levels after a hunting bloodbath in the early 19th century brought the subspecies to the brink of extinction.

10 A young fur seal looks warily around an icy whelping site in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence.

11 Dean Miller, an Australian fur seal biologist, was the first person to spot the large white object floating past Macquarie island in the far south-west corner of the Pacific Ocean.

12 Falkland Islands fur seal perches on a rock outcrop off New Island, where seafood-rich waters nourish a wildlife population diverse in nature and often astonishing in number.

13 Outside the reserve at Five Fingers Peninsula, a fur seal pup in Dusky Sound remains protected, as are all marine mammals in New Zealand's waters.

14 The Antarctic fur seal, Arctocephalus gazella, would be hunted to the verge of extinction.

15 The hardy natives used harpoons to hunt the Southern fur seal and seldom ventured inland.

16 "The behaviours that we observe will impact upon the genetic diversity of fur seal populations and may have helped them recover so successfully from near extinction only 100 years ago," said Hoffman.

17 "I've never seen anything like it - we looked out to the horizon and just saw this huge floating island of ice, " said fur seal biologist Dean Miller.

18 Today it is fueling the astonishing resurrection of the Antarctic fur seal, as well as the slow but steady recovery of several whale species.

19 The smallest foot fin is the suborder of animals fur seal Galapagos Islands.

20 Antarctica is home to many seal species such as this fur seal. Its large eyes are designed to seek out prey in dim waters and are a slightly different shape to a land mammal's.

21 One need only see the seals on the ice after the open to kill, starting with the manufacture of leather fur seal peeled off the body and other parts of the result of "tonic and aphrodisiac."