CHATHAM, Mass., — On a recent fishing trip around Monomoy Island, Orleans fisherman Bill Amaru and his crew counted 4,000 gray seals that had hauled out on the island's sandy beaches.
"The seals were 15 to 20 deep in three separate haul-outs," Amaru told an audience of more than 240 people at a daylong seal symposium Saturday at Chatham High School. If seals are in the water 80 to 90 percent of the time, Amaru said, that means a lot more seals than are being counted.
Local fishermen have been complaining for years that seals have been eating their fish, especially lately when fishing regulations cut fish quotas by as much as 77 percent because they were at low population levels.
While the experts still don't know the exact number of gray seals in our waters, the latest stock assessment from the National Marine Fisheries Service estimated gray seals on the Cape and Islands at 15,756 in 2011 as compared with 5,611 in 1999. On one day in April 2011, researchers counted more than 10,000 seals hauled out on Monomoy alone.
"There are so many of them out there that they can redirect a whole biomass of fish to the point where we can't catch them," Chatham weir fisherman Ernie Eldredge said. "Lots of people ask why they can't catch a striped bass off the beach, and they just have to look at what is patrolling that beach.
The seal symposium, sponsored by the Friends of Pleasant Bay, the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies and Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association, was intended to share research with the public and begin policy discussions among fishermen, town officials and other decision-makers. The groups also hoped to identify critical research topics and funding sources.
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