Saving Seafood

Researchers Return to Study Gray Seal Pups in New England

February 6, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

It’s gray seal pupping season in New England! NOAA researchers are working with colleagues to gather data from pups on Muskeget and Monomoy islands off the southeastern Massachusetts coast.

Pupping season generally runs from mid-December to early February, peaking in mid-January. Our researchers have conducted studies of animal abundance, distribution, and health on the islands in January for the past eight years. One research team is working on Muskeget Island off Nantucket, the largest gray seal breeding and pupping colony in the United States. Another team is on Monomoy, an island near Chatham on Cape Cod that is part of the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge.

Kimberly Murray, who coordinates the seal research program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Woods Hole Laboratory and leads the team on Muskeget Island, outlined the teams’ goals. “We plan to place 20 satellite tags and nine acoustic tags on the weaned gray seal pups, and to collect as many health samples from pups as we can. Our goal is to sample 50 pups on Muskeget and 100 on Monomoy, but that depends on factors such as weather conditions, scheduling, and departure of weaned pups.”

The team also sampled 14 weaned gray seal pups on Seal Island in Maine. They placed five satellite tags and two acoustic tags on seal pups there to learn where those pups go. On January 30 researchers sampled and tagged 15 gray seal pups on the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, which includes Great Point Light, on Nantucket and collected scat or seal poop for microbiome/microplastics/food habits work.

Read the full release here

MASSACHUSETTS: You can see the seal population in Chatham from space

August 29, 2017 — There are so many seals on the coast of Massachusetts that you can see them from space.

Literally. If you zoom in on Cape Cod using the satellite photo feature on Google Maps, you won’t miss the herds of seals scattered along the coast.

Start at the southern tip of Monomoy Island near Monomoy Point and move north on the ocean side of Monomoy Island.

Kimberly Murray, a research coordinator for the seal program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said officials this year observed up to 25,000 seals off Massachusetts in a single day.

The number of seals currently residing in the waters off the state’s coast is likely as high as 50,000, based on recent research that also factored in the number of seals in the water.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Tagging study of gray seals could cost a half million dollars

December 12, 2016 — NANTUCKET, Mass. — As David Pierce sat at the table at the Nantucket Seal Symposium last month, he said one image came to mind: private pilot Aaron Knight’s video from April of miles of gray seals, a dozen deep, cheek by jowl, banding the Monomoy shoreline.

Recently appointed as director of the state Division of Marine Fisheries, Pierce is a veteran of decades of fisheries negotiations as former director Paul Diodati’s proxy on the New England Fishery Management Council. Fishery managers live and die by population estimates – known as stock assessments – that help set sustainable catch levels for commercial fishermen, so it was disconcerting to hear that the same level of science had not been applied to the predators who eat them.

“The determination of population size is extremely important, especially in the context of ecosystem management in New England,” Pierce said. “If (gray seals) are out there in large numbers foraging, what might their impact be on the Georges Bank ecosystem?”

The answer will not be coming any time soon, according to federal fisheries officials at the symposium.

“It’s just an expensive number to get,” said Sean Hayes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration branch chief for protected species in the Northeast.

Kimberly Murray, coordinator of the seal research program at NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Research Center in Woods Hole, said it could cost as much as a half million dollars to conduct the tagging study alone.

The operational budget for seal research is around $10,000, Hayes said, although that doesn’t include the salaries for the two full-time and two part-time employees in the program.

Federal agencies are required to stick to the budgets they are allocated by Congress, and NOAA can’t shift money around among species. Because of their historic comeback from virtual extinction in New England waters, gray seals are far down on the budget priority list, Hayes explained, and get minimal funding. To put more money into seal research, he’d have to take it from other programs for more highly endangered species such as right whales during the budget process, and make a successful plea to put that amount into seals.

“We definitely want to try and find the resources to do the whole population count, but competing resource priorities from headquarters for species like the right whales, or a roof collapse at a science center, that comes up every year,” Hayes said. “Headquarters is getting hit by all the science centers. Everyone has an urgent priority.”

The region’s fishermen have been asking in vain for years for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries division to give them a true population number for gray seals to gauge their impact on fish stocks such as cod, haddock, flounders and striped bass. With the arrival of hundreds of great white sharks to inshore waters of Cape Cod every year, to feast on members of the largest gray seal colony in the U.S., new voices have emerged with concerns about public safety.

“Where is this headed and how are we going to know at what rate this population is increasing if we don’t know what the number is now?” asked Orleans Natural Resources Manager Nate Sears.

Their resurgence is both a Marine Mammal Protection Act success story and a cause for concern.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times