An elephant seal has returned to the sea, leaving a trail of destruction.
Neil, who weighs 142st, left Tasmania and his legion of fans behind to disappear into the South Pacific ocean.
Visiting twice a year, the blubbery marine mammal has become a popular feature of Hobart.
Most elephant seals come to land to breed and shed their fur on remote subantarctic islands, but Neil has taken a liking to the coastal town of Seven Mile Beach.
Neil first found fame in July 2022 after landing in Hobart to moult – a period during which elephant seals shed their old fur and skin.
The seal wreaked havoc on his new hometown, flattening traffic cones, peering through doors, dozing in the road and slamming into signposts.
Footage of his antics went viral. “He’s more ungovernable than ever,” reads a caption on one of the videos on Neil’s TikTok page, which has 1.7 million followers.
If the elephant seal’s titanic size and appetite for destruction can come across as intimidating, Neil has never hurt a human.
Indeed there was anger last month after wildlife workers prodded Neil with wooden poles and barge boards to try and get him to return to the beach. The seal repeatedly reared up and lashed out during the operation.
Jason Howlett, who runs the animal’s social media pages, said there had been uproar in the local community after that incident.
Kris Carlyon, of Tasmania’s department of natural resources, warned this month that there was a danger of the public “loving Neil to death” by ignoring orders not to get too close to him or to try and take selfies with him.
He said: “We have seen examples around the world where large, potentially dangerous animals have had to be euthanised if there is risky behaviour by the public.”
It is thought that Neil was born in Tasmania, rather than on uninhabited Macquarie Island, 932 miles south of Hobart, where most elephant seals in the region come into the world.
Elephant seals return to their place of birth twice a year to breed and, if they are young males like Neil, fight and spar with each other.
With no elephant seal rivals in Hobart, Neil has so far had to make do with traffic cones.
Those cones are safe for the time being, because their nemesis has waved goodbye to Seven Mile Beach and returned to the waves.