But studying them has been a challenge, and so this top predator has largely remained a mystery—until now.
Over 50 hours of video footage of leopard seals in Antarctica show them doing things we've never seen before, including stealing food from each other, dragging fur seal pups right off beaches, and rooting out fish from seafloor crevices.
The seals also engage in what scientists think is food caching—or taking prey only to hide it on the seafloor to save for later. (Read about how a leopard seal "fed" a photographer penguins.)
The animals' solitary nature and preference for pack ice—chunks of ice far offshore often separated by hundreds of miles of open ocean—made it nearly impossible to study them in the past.
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