Whale Center of New England News

By Richard Gaines, Gloucester Daily Times Staff Writer

October 02, 2008

The spring-born harbor seal, as vulnerable out of water as it is agile in it, dragged its tired body over the low tide expanse of Long Beach back down toward the surf at mid-morning yesterday.

The seal has been resting beneath a pile of seaweed under a set of stairs at the seawall for who knows how long.

As if drawn to the water, the 21 1/2 foot long, perhaps 35-pound seal stopped, seemingly exhausted. Then it started, stopped, and started again, repeating the pattern until after more than an hour the seal finally made its way back into the sea and was gone.

But farther south on Long Beach two of the survivor's brothers, sisters or perhaps cousins lay dead.

Up and down the entire east-facing coast of New England, a mysterious, widespread stranding of seals and a smaller number of porpoises was unfolding.

Biologists at Gloucester's Whale Center of New England and Boston's New England Aquarium were left to speculate about the cause.

Their best guess was that the widespread event is explained by the combination of harbor seals at a most vulnerable stage of life and the long firm blow from the northeast that could have drained the stamina of the weakest of this year's litter, throwing them dead or near dead up on east-facing shores.

On Cape Ann, more of the beached pinnipeds or fin-footed mammals died than survived, according to Heidi Pearson, the stranding coordinator and assistant director of the Whale Center who sat patiently on Long Beach about 150 feet from the struggling seal, shooing off walkers with dogs and recording the facts of the finding for science.

Since Sunday, at least 16 harbor seals, all born last spring, but no longer nursing and on their own, have been found on Cape Ann beaches, according to Pearson and police reports.

Pearson said mothering lasts only about a month, and mortality is high.

For that reason, her colleague Kate Sardi, a senior biologist in the rescue department at the New England Aquarium, said she prefers the term "young of the year" to "pup" to describe these ultra inexperienced harbor seals' lonely struggle in their first autumn.

Of those, 10 were found dead, one died after its discovery, and four, including the seal that Pearson protected, made it back to the ocean. One of the returnees, Pearson said, one - with unusual markings - seemed quite healthy.

It made the swim from Good Harbor Beach to Plymouth in a Phelpsian three hours.

But that superb athlete was the exception. Most of the strandees seemed weak and "emaciated," Sardi said.

More typical of the strandees was the seal that the Whale Center took off Long Beach last Sunday and sent in a dog kennel by truck to the Mystic, Conn., Aquarium. It was being treated with antibiotics for pneumonia and infected wounds.

Pearson said a report late yesterday had good news. "It's doing better and tube feeding," she said.

Harbor seals are true, or earless, seals, and are common along the entire New England Coast and through the Canadian Maritimes (as well as in the same latitudes of the land masses of the Atlantic and Pacific).

Adults grow to 6 feet and up to 300 pounds.

Sardi was confident the mass stranding was brought on by the long stretch strong winds from the northeast. "It's a good theory," she said. "These were a huge couple of storms (dating back to last weekend, just before the first beached seals were discovered). These aggregates on Cape Ann are not unusual. We do often see an increase in strandings."

Pearson was not so sure the winds and currents were to blame for the strandings.

"Rough water exhausting them? Possibly," she said. "Then again, we have lots of rough water and not this concentration of dead seals."

With harbor seals, Sardi said, "In the year after weaning, the mortality rate is very high. The failure to thrive (typically traces) to not finding enough food (school fish)."

But generally, Sardi said "the harbor seal population is very healthy."

Population estimates for the entire region were unavailable, but she said there are about 14,000 harbor seals in Maine waters. On the West Coast, there were about 40,000 along the California coast a decade ago, according to the San Fransisco-based Marine Mammal Center.

The whale center teaches "seals on the shore may be sick or injured, but they may just be resting. Resting on shore, even for more than a day, is normal."

In its brochure, Ashore on the North Shore, the whale center advises that people should stay far away, at least 50 yards, from beached mammals, to avoid further stressing the animal, never touch a live sea mammal and instead call the Whale Center hot line at 281-6351.