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A million seal pups drown off Canada’s coast
‘A million seal pups dead’ – this was the headline (in Swedish) for a brief article in Friday’s Sydsvenskan, a newspaper for the southern Swedish province of Skåne. But it was enough to make me want to know more.
The lack of ice cover on Canada’s east coast has contributed to massive die off of seal pups, which are born on ice sheets. If there is not enough sea ice cover or the ice melts before the pups learn how to swim, the pups drown.
A study by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada determined that 45% of the seal pups born during the early spring of 2010 died – that’s 700,000 baby seals. The researchers suspect a high number of seal young deaths occurred during the winter of 2011, also due to a lack of sea ice.
As the Earth warms due to the effects of climate change, seal mothers have more and more difficulty finding thick ice cover on which to give birth to their pups.
From Science magazine:
A mother’s choice of an icy platform is crucial to her pup’s survival. After just 12 days of nursing, mom leaves, and the weaned pup stays adrift for another month. At first too buoyant to dive, the blubbery youngster fasts for a few weeks, then gradually practices hunting while returning to rest on the ice.
Though scientists suspect that the sea ice cover on Canada’s east coast will fluctuate in coming years, seal mothers may be driven north, to colder climates in search of ice thick enough to give birth on.
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Seriously a million? Jeez, what can we do now? Can we possibly make an assimilated habitat for those animals? these are the things that we can’t deny and can’t just shrug off our shoulders.. A clear evidence that the climate change has a domino effect. the CO17 should have a gigantic screen as their background and this massive death of seal pups should be played over and over. or was given as their screen saver!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!