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Gray seals are gregarious animals—they gather in large groups on shore to breed, give birth, and molt. Female gray seals live up to 35 years and males about 25 years. Gray seals primarily hunt squid, fish, and sandeels; their main predators are humans, sharks, and orcas.
Weddell seals in Erebus Bay, Antarctica, may look like couch potatoes when they are resting on ice. However, these seals, which are the southernmost population of the southernmost living mammals, are exceptional divers that can reach depths of more than 900 meters and recorded dives lasting 96 minutes, which is well beyond their aerobic threshold.
Hungry seals will keep their whiskers ready to search out the tiny clues that lead to food. And I’ll keep flipping over rocks to find other useful lessons from nature, waiting to be uncovered. This prototype flow sensor, designed by Heather Beem, incorporates seal whiskers’ geometry.
The seals’ whiskers act as a sort of dietary timeline, incorporating molecular signatures from various food sources as they grow. Using a technique called stable isotope analysis, the researchers can identify different signatures in a seal’s whiskers and match them to potential prey items.
There was once a bounty on gray seals in New England; hunters in Massachusetts and Maine got $5 if they turned in a nose or skin. From the 1890s until the 1960s, an estimated 135,000 seals were killed, and seals disappeared from Cape Cod. Then the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 outlawed seal killing.
For years, sperm whales and elephant seals were thought to hold world records for holding their breath under water. But those animals have nothing on beaked whales. Using digital tags temporarily suction-cupped to two species of beaked whales, researchers led by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution tracked Cuvier’s beaked…
Shero and her colleagues are investigating how iron in the mother seals’ diets impacts the pup’s diving capacity– and survival rates. An estimated 90% of Sable Island seal pups die during their first year, most likely because of the increased competition for food. “Iron is how seals carry lots of oxygen in their bodies for long dives.
The research has strengthened WHOI’s already good working relationship with the local fishing community, and study results should help identify patterns in the seals’ behavior—such as favorite feeding times—that could enable fishers to minimize interactions between seals and gillnets in the future.
The precise number of gray seals in the area is not known; however, over the last 30 years, in areas where there were once a few hundred, there are now several thousand. There are three sites or “haul-outs” on the lower Cape where large numbers of gray seals leave the water to avoid predators, regulate their body temperature, and socialize.
266 Woods Hole Road, Woods Hole, MA 02543-1050. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a 501 (c)(3) organization.