January 22, 2015 — This time of year, thousands of gray seals are drawn to the Cape and Islands to breed and give birth: So are researchers who converged last week on Muskeget Island, a remote scrap of sand and scrub brush off Nantucket, and the largest pupping site in the U.S.
This time of year, thousands of gray seals are drawn to the Cape and Islands to breed and give birth.
So are researchers, 30 of whom converged last week on Muskeget Island, a remote scrap of sand and scrub brush off Nantucket, and the largest pupping site in the U.S.; and on Monomoy Island off Chatham, where a large seal colony now produces hundreds of pups.
This was the third year of a long term study on the health, behavior and habitat of the local gray seal population. The study is meant to help answer questions posed by scientists and others about the effects of an expanding seal population on natural resources, fish stocks and other seal species. Others would like to know the upper limit of the seal population's explosive growth, since seals attract great white sharks to beaches also used by humans.
“What is happening with the population growth rate? How is it expanding? What is their ecological impact on fishery resources? These are some of the things we have placed a high priority on,” said Gordon Waring, the head of the seal research program at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole. Collaborators from aquariums, universities, conservation groups and federal agencies worked at the two sites.
Additionally, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been looking at the flu virus and other infectious diseases in seals to study how diseases are transmitted from animals to humans.
Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times