Other Mammals

Overview

This group brings together the marine mammals that divers most often meet outside whales and dolphins: seals, sea lions, manatees, dugongs, and a few other region-specific species. They do not behave like one uniform category. Pinnipeds often move between haul-out sites and feeding grounds, sirenians spend long periods grazing in shallow seagrass habitat, and each subgroup responds differently to boats, current, and diver pressure.

How Divers Identify Them

The quickest split is body shape and movement style. Seals and sea lions are streamlined pinnipeds with obvious foreflippers and rear flippers, while manatees and dugongs are slower sirenians with paddle-like forelimbs and broad horizontal tails. Sea lions usually look more agile and social in the water; seals often appear more compact and direct; sirenians are slower, grazing mammals tied to warm, sheltered habitat.

Where Encounters Happen

Dive encounters cluster around very different settings. Sea lions and seals often appear around rocky coastlines, kelp forests, islands, and current-fed feeding zones, while dugongs and manatees are linked to calm, shallow water with seagrass or warm refuge habitat. That means destination research matters more than the broad group label, because a great sea lion trip and a great dugong trip are built around completely different conditions.

Planning Limits

This page works best as a guide to the kinds of encounters in the group rather than a promise of one style of interaction. Resting haul-outs, pupping sites, and grazing areas are especially sensitive, so the best operators accept shorter encounters instead of forcing extra passes.

This group guide pulls together 6 published Other Mammals guides so divers can move from broad trip intent to the right species pages, destinations, and dive spots faster.

Conservation pressure across this mixed group is real but uneven. Disturbance at haul-outs, entanglement, vessel strikes, habitat loss, harmful algal blooms, pollution, and seagrass decline all matter, depending on the species and region. Because this category spans both pinnipeds and sirenians, divers should assume local rules are species-specific and often stricter around pupping, resting, and warm-water refuge areas.

Movement and Habitat Use

Movement patterns vary across the group. Pinnipeds cycle between shore-based haul-outs and offshore feeding areas, sometimes over large distances, while sirenians stay much closer to seagrass meadows, warm-water refuges, or sheltered coastal habitat. For divers, that means timing around tides, pupping seasons, forage pulses, and local temperature is often more important than broad regional branding.

Cape Town, Galapagos Islands, and Marsa Alam (Abu Dabbab and Elphinstone) currently stand out as strong destination entry points for Other Mammals planning.

United States of America, Mexico, and Australia are some of the clearest country-level starting points for this group right now.