And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one.

And this bear swam out to that seal 800 lb. bearded seal grabbed it, swam back and ate it.

So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal.

All the leopard seal was doing it's just biting a balloon.

When they're in rut they're similar to seals in the way, like, a seal has to open its nose to breathe.

As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad.

And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here.

Now, what leopard seals do mostly is, they eat penguins.

This is sort of the munch of the penguins.

C. Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals

And tragically in 2003 , a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal.

A marine biologist was attacked and drowned by a Leopard Seal at Rothera Research Station in July 2003.

They're not these little harbor seals.

What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display.

The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous.

And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat.

Photographer Paul Nicklin traveled to Antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals.

You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon.

But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it.

Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals.

These ringed seals, these are the fatsicles of the Arctic.

Of the different types of marine mammals, seals and sea lions are the most affected (particularly by entanglement).

The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked.

These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice.

Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation.

The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals entered into force on 11 March 1978.

That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with.

And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth.

She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me.

A number of countries are not reporting systematically on seal captures or kills.

This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season.

I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

We valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill.

I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter.

I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made.

And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly, they're done.

Table 2 Reported capture and killing of seals, 2000 2001, 2001 2002, 2002 2003 and 2003 2004

And that's when I got a story idea I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood.

The reported capture and killing of seals between 2000 2001 and 2003 2004 is given in table 2 below.

But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming.

GoldenCheetah

It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year.

Marcus The Panthers.

Boy Panthers?

That's the Cheetah Generation, and Africa's salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs.