The decline of the central California breeding population cannot be attributed solely to any single threat listed below, but instead is the result of a combination of multiple threats. In some cases, exposure to one threat may make the animals more susceptible to the others (e.g., high level of contaminants may make an animal more […]
CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island, Canada, March 26, 2010 (ENS) – Thousands of harp seal pups are presumed dead in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence and starving pups are being found abandoned on the beaches of Prince Edward Island, victims of the worst ice conditions ever recorded in the region. Environment Canada said March 16 that […]
Pups seen on Quebec shores, as far north as Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula Last Updated: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 1:24 PM ET The Canadian Press An exceptional lack of sea ice on the Gulf of St. Lawrence this winter has left seal mothers with few places to bear their young or to feed their pups. […]
Lack of ice could hurt seal population Last Updated: Monday, March 1, 2010 | 4:59 PM NT CBC News A Canadian Coast Guard official said Monday that many parts of the ocean near Newfoundland and Labrador are devoid of pack ice — a condition that hasn’t been seen in at least 40 years. “It’s been […]
(Penn State) “The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past,” says Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University. Post leads a large, international team that carried out ecosystem-wide studies of the biological response to Arctic warming during the fourth International Polar Year, which ended in 2008. […]
By Julio Godoy BERLIN, Apr 3 (Tierramérica) – Ringed seals in the Baltic Sea are finding fewer and fewer ice caves in which to raise their young. Rising global temperatures are the problem, and in turn are depleting the main food source of the giant polar bear, say scientists. … According to the latest report […]
Researchers have marked another decline in northern fur seal pup births in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, where most of the world’s population of northern fur seals gather in the summer to rest and breed. “We started seeing an over-all decline in the abundance of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands around […]
WARMER temperatures and earlier melting of sea ice are causing polar bears to go hungry. The number of undernourished bears has tripled in a 20-year period. Seth Cherry of the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored the health of polar bears in the ice-covered Beaufort Sea region of the Arctic during April and May […]
By James Morgan, Science reporter, BBC News Harbour seals, or common seals, are familiar faces along coastlines across the northern hemisphere. But they are now vanishing in the UK at an alarming rate, warn scientists from St Andrews University. Numbers have halved in the hardest hit area, the Orkney Islands, since 2001 – falling almost […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis, mongabay.com Caspian Seal populations have declined 90% in the past 100 years, prompting the IUCN to switch their designation from Vulnerable to Endangered. A team from the University of Leeds performed a series of surveys in 2007 and 2008 which revealed that the birth rate has decreased from around 17,000 pups born […]
