Saving Seafood

Cape Codders call for killing sharks, seals following fatal attack

September 28, 2018 — WELLFLEET, Mass. — Several of the hundreds of people who turned out here last night for a public forum on sharks in the wake of the first fatal attack in Massachusetts in more than 80 years urged officials to kill them or the seals that tend to attract them.

Laurie Voke of Eastham said this month’s death of Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old boogie-boarder from Revere, said shark attacks on seals swimming near people on outer Cape Cod have become “too numerous to count” in recent years, but officials have failed to lift the fishing ban on white sharks or to take steps to control the number of seals.

“Instead, certain government officials have given pet names to white sharks and prioritized the lives and safety of sharks and seals over that of those who swim in the cape water,” Voke, the mother of four lifeguards, told a panel of officials and experts on the animals.

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

 

Alec Wilkinson: A Deadly Shark Attack at a Beach on Cape Cod That I Know Well

September 17, 2018 — I grew up spending summers in a house that my parents built for five thousand dollars, in 1952, on a hill above Newcomb Hollow, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a young man died on Saturday from a shark bite. My father used to say that there were no sharks off the Cape, because the water was too cold. He was wrong, of course. The sharks were likely always there, but in deep water, following whales. The whales would occasionally die, for whatever reason, and fishermen would sometimes see sharks feeding on their carcasses. Now, however, the sharks are close to shore, because they prey on seals, which used to be scarce and are not any longer, a result of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed in 1972. The act is typical of our attempts to manage nature. In my childhood, I never saw seals, and it seemed desirable to protect them from being drowned in fishermen’s nets. Now there are so many that one of my nieces described them as an infestation. This summer, I started to think of them as sea rats.

Arthur Medici, the man who died, was twenty-six. He came to America two years ago from Brazil to go to college. In photographs, he is handsome, with dark eyes and a direct gaze. On Saturday, he broke a rule that is risky to break, by swimming at some distance from the crowd. Sharks patrol the shore for seals. They are white sharks, which were once called man-eaters; sometimes they are called “the men in gray suits,” since they are gray with white undersides. They are shaped like torpedoes with fins, a minimalist fish, and there is nothing fancy about their appearance, as if only two colors were necessary for a serious creature. On videos taken from airplanes, you see them moving lazily, unconcerned, since nothing threatens them. The planes tend to be working for Greg Skomal, of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who, with the help of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, has been tagging white sharks for the last few years in order to determine how many visit the Cape—white sharks are not so much migratory as footloose; one of the surprises of tagging them has been learning that instead of following patterns or routes they seem to go wherever the hell they feel like. When Skomal stabs them with a tracking tag on the end of a harpoon, some of them don’t even react, although this summer, one of them leapt up beneath him as if to attack him as he stood on the bow pulpit with his harpoon.

Read the full opinion piece at The New Yorker

 

NOAA issues clarion call as dead seal numbers hit 599

September 5, 2018 — Seals, some sick and others already dead, continue to wash up on New England shores as fishery managers and marine researchers scramble to identify what is causing the largest unusual seal mortality in this region since 2011.

On Tuesday, NOAA Fisheries updated its preliminary numbers to show that, in the period between July 1 and Aug. 29, 599 harbor and gray seals — 462 dead and 137 alive — were stranded on the coastlines of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Since the previous preliminary count was completed on Aug. 25, 55 newly counted dead seals were among the 67 seals that washed ashore in New England, according to the figures supplied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The strandings have occurred from Down East Maine to Massachusetts’ North Shore — including at least one in Rockport last week and four on Gloucester’s Coffin Beach two weeks ago — and prompted NOAA last Friday to issue an unusual mortality event for Northeast gray and harbor seals.

The issuance of the unusual mortality event, which NOAA Fisheries has used in the past in efforts to protect Gulf of Maine cod and northern right whale populations, is the regulatory equivalent of a clarion call.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

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

Scientists eye flu, pollution in spike in seal deaths

August 22, 2018 — As the number of dead or stranded live seals washing up along the coast from northern Massachusetts to southern Maine continues to increase dramatically, marine mammal experts are considering influenza or environmental pollution as potential explanations.

Although there is no definitive cause for the uptick in seal deaths — the count is more than 400 so far this year — the Seacoast Science Center, in Rye, New Hampshire, is continuing to test tissue from fresh seal carcasses to determine if there is a possibility of illness. Live seals have been found in poor condition with signs of lethargy, coughing, sneezing and having seizures, according to Jennifer Goebel, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration based in Gloucester.

NOAA, a scientific agency which focuses on the conditions of the oceans, major waterways and the atmosphere, released an updated number of seal strandings and deaths Tuesday morning, primarily gray and harbor seals.

In northern Massachusetts and New Hampshire, marine mammal specialists found 15 live and 26 dead seals in July. As of Aug. 20, they had found 14 live and 31 dead seals in the same region. As of the same date, 57 dead seals have been accounted for in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to NOAA statistics. Four seals, three babies and one adult, were reportedly found dead on Plum Island in the last week.

NOAA scientists totaled 404 dead and live seals when examining all seals found on the shoreline in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Experts still haven’t found cause of southern Maine seal ‘die off’

August 21, 2018 — Even as volunteers for Marine Mammals of Maine responded to more dead seals in southern Maine on Monday — more than 125 since Aug. 12 — officials from various agencies were clear that no cause for the “die off” has been determined.

“There have been no results yet to say what’s going on,” Lynda Doughty of the Harpswell-based nonprofit organization said Monday. “Other media speculation is that pollution is causing the die-off [but] no conclusive tests have been returned on southern Maine seals.”

Friends of Casco Bay, a marine stewardship organization founded in 1989 to improve and protect the environmental health of Casco Bay, reported Monday that tests conducted last week “show good water quality with enough oxygen for marine life.”

On Thursday, NOAA Fisheries New England/Mid-Atlantic wrote on its Facebook page that while samples have been taken from the seals and are being tested, “we don’t have any results yet — and that may take a few weeks.”

Previous mass deaths of seals in Maine have been attributed to avian influenza, distemper and harmful algal blooms such as red tide, the organization said.

On Monday, Doughty said the number of mostly seals found dead or stranded in southern Maine was “out of the norm for what we normally see.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Return of the seals: Once eradicated mammals back in local waters

July 2, 2018 — At any given time, approximately 600 seals splash, bathe and feed around a modest mass of rocks six miles off the coast of Maine, the northernmost of the Isles of Shoals.

These seals, both gray and harbor species, have made a resurgence in local waters over the last two decades following the imperative enaction of federal protections. Prior to the 1970s, the species had essentially been extirpated in Maine and Massachusetts, after being hunted for their pelts, and killed as competition for fish, said Jennifer Seavey, executive director of Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, a joint program between the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University.

Since 2011, Seavey and her staff have been monitoring the seal resurgence at Duck Island, an effort led by Andrea Bogomolni, a researcher from Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution. The work is conducted with undergraduate interns, and each summer, two students learn the monitoring methods, which are done by boat and with very specific tracking technology and procedures.

The monitoring program runs from May to August, Seavey said, and the interns take to the water approximately 30 times, the boat running a specific transect around the island. Photographs are taken on the same transects each time, where the laboratory uses the unique pattern on the seals’ fur to identify them as individuals.

Read the full story at the Portsmouth Herald

Scientists study how marine mammals survive at great depths

April 30, 2018 — Whales, dolphins and seals have evolved to hunt prey deep in the ocean, an environment that would otherwise prove deadly to animals that depend on breathing air to live. Until recently, scientists believed marine mammals’ known physical adaptations protected them from the effects of such punishing depths.

But scientists were baffled by computer models that showed that, even with the known adaptations, 50 percent of animals studied still should have experienced the bends. Researchers concluded there must be some else going on.

A new study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Oceanographic Foundation of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, may provide an answer. The study, funded by the U.S. Navy, found that deep-diving marine mammals use a physical adaptation — the collapse of one portion of the lungs — to block the flow of nitrogen into the blood and prevents the animals from getting the bends, the crippling release of nitrogen gas that can occurs when surfacing from dives deeper than 130 feet.

“If you get the conditions right, you can get a nice exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide but block the nitrogen,” said Michael Moore, a WHOI senior scientist who specializes in the analysis of marine mammal mortalities. Moore is a co-author of the study, which was published April 25 in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”

The mammals have other physical adaptations that help them survive the depths when they exhaust available oxygen in their lungs, including a high amount of proteins in blood and muscle that bind oxygen and a higher ratio of red to white blood cells. Their ribs and lungs can collapse under pressure without breaking and their airways are hardened bunkers that remain partially open to power the signals they use to locate one another and their prey.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times