Saving Seafood

It’s the beginning of seal pupping season in Maine

April 7, 2022 — April marks the beginning of the time of year when harbor seals start giving birth to pups.

Typically, pups can be born as early as the beginning of April, but the season gets into full swing from May to June, according to the Marine Mammals of Maine website.

Baby harbor seals can appear to be stranded and alone on Maine beaches, but the mothers are typically foraging for food nearby and feel as though the babies can be safely left alone, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Seal pups may be left alone by their mothers for up to 24 hours.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

Reminder to Give Seals Space

April 1, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

As more people are taking to the outdoors and we approach harbor seal pupping season, we are asking the public to help us by social distancing with animals too! Respect the social distance that is required by these sensitive animals. Help our stranding responders stay safe by not endangering, touching, or closely approaching  potentially healthy animals.

Read our webstory for more information about how you can help us avoid wildlife tragedies.

Questions?
Media: Contact Allison Ferreira, Regional Office, 978-281-9103

MASSACHUSETTS: Seals on a comeback, attracting sharks

May 28, 2019 — Seals have rebounded to healthy numbers along Massachusetts’ shores after being nearly decimated by early settlers and a bounty that later wiped out tens of thousands of them, according to experts — and that is what is attracting sharks.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there are at least 27,000 gray seals and 75,000 harbor seals in U.S. waters during their breeding seasons.

“What we’re witnessing is a comeback to a really healthy marine environment,” said Kimberly Murray, seal program lead at NOAA Fisheries in Woods Hole.

The numbers are a stark contrast to the 1700s, when gray seals had been nearly wiped out during the first 100 years of New England settlement, said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium in Boston.

By the late 1800s, the seals had rebounded, but conflicts with commercial fisheries and a desire for the seals’ meat and pelts led to a bounty on both gray and harbor seals from 1888 to 1962 in Massachusetts and Maine. During those years, as many as 135,000 seals were killed, Murray said.

“Seals were perceived as competitors to fisherman,” LaCasse said. “Fishermen would carry shotguns in their boats and shoot them on sight.”

Read the full story at the Boston Herald

NOAA officials say seal die-off linked to virus

September 24, 2018 — Gray and harbor seals have lured sharks in increasing numbers into Cape Cod waters, with tragic results, but the burgeoning seal population is taking a hit from viruses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issued an unusual mortality event alert for both species of seal in the Gulf of Maine.

From July 1 to Aug. 29 (when the alert was issued) 599 seals were found dead (137) or ill and stranded (462) on New England shores. In the few weeks since that number has soared to 921. Most of those were in Maine (629), with 147 in New Hampshire and 125 in Massachusetts.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

For comparison the nearly 500 seals found last month is roughly 10 times the number that stranded in August of 2017.

“That is attributed to the influences of disease,” noted Terri Rowles, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Program coordinator.

Read the full story at the Eastham Wicked Local

 

Infected East Coast seals are washing ashore – and are a danger to people and pets, experts say

September 4, 2018 — Hundreds of East Coast seals are showing up, stranded on New England shores dead or sick.

Harbor and gray seals on the northern Atlantic Coast of the United States have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries. Others have tested positive for phocine distemper virus, similar to the virus dogs can contract and which has caused epidemics among seals in other parts of the world, killing thousands, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Both gray and harbor seals can range as far south as the Carolinas, where they sometimes travel during the winter months and haul themselves onto beaches to rest and soak up some sun.

The seals that end up stranded but alive are “in poor body condition with clinical signs of lethargy, coughing, sneezing and seizing,” according to NOAA. As of last week, 532 seals had washed up on the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Of those, more than 400 were found dead.

Samples from those seals were sent to Tufts University and the University of California, Davis labs for testing, NOAA said. Samples tested “preliminarily positive” for either bird flu or the distemper virus. Four of the seals tested positive for both viruses.

Read the full story at The Charlotte Observer

Need To Track A Submarine? A Harbor Seal Can Show You How

September 4, 2018 — Using lessons learned from harbor seals and artificial intelligence, engineers in California may be on to a new way to track enemy submarines.

The idea started with research published in 2001 on the seals.

Scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany showed that blindfolded seals could still track a robotic fish. The researchers concluded that the seals did this by detecting the strength and direction of the whirling vortex the robot created as it swam through the water.

Subsequent research showed that the seal used its whiskers as sensors to detect the flow patterns.

Eva Kanso, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California, is interested in how animals use water flows to guide their behavior. It’s an academic puzzle for Kanso, but a very real, very practical question for a harbor seal.

“The animal wants to understand — is it a prey that created this vortex, or is it a predator that created this flow pattern?” she says.

Kanso and her colleagues have been trying to emulate the seals’ ability to make those distinctions.

Read the full story at NPR