A rare hooded seal pup born last week in the Netherlands has been moved to a more remote location to protect it from human contact.
The pup was born on Vlieland, one of the West Frisian islands in the Wadden Sea off the north coast of the Netherlands. Hooded seals usually give birth on pack ice, and are rare visitors to these southern latitudes. In the past 10 years, there have been just four records of the species on the islands. Pups are weaned after just four days – the shortest period of any mammal.
The seals are silver grey with charcoal faces and dark spots on their flanks, with fur pelts that have made them attractive to humans for coats and hats. Their pups are about one metre long at birth and have blue-grey backs that later develop into their leopard-like spots. Normally the seals follow the drifting pack ice off Arctic coasts such as east Greenland, from where this pair probably came. But now the warming seas are causing ice to melt, and their home territories are becoming unsustainable.
The result is that unusual visitors such as these are appearing more frequently. The hooded seal mother and pup were discovered last Monday on land used by the Dutch military for training. The mother disappeared on Thursday, leaving the pup to fend itself. A rescue team from the Zeehondencentrum in Pieterburen, on the north-eastern coast of the Dutch mainland, has since moved the young animal to a more remote location.
Like the walruses that have appeared off the Netherlands as well as UK and Irish shores recently, these visitors appear to be reluctant ambassadors of climate change. Hooded seals are used to ice floes and Arctic seas but sandy beaches and tidal flows disrupt normal behaviour – not least breeding and pup-bearing females, as this pup’s predicament shows.
Jeroen Hoekendijk, the researcher who photographed the young seal, said the animals were unaccustomed to these waters: “They are deep divers. The shallow and warm southern North Sea is no place for them,” he said. Sandy shores present potential danger, too. “With high tide, a pup can flush away [whereas] the ice floats, and this is no issue.”
The hooded seals of the north-east Atlantic are facing precipitous declines due to the climate crisis and their population is assessed as “vulnerable”. Historically, hooded seals were threatened by hunting. In 1881, a young Arthur Conan Doyle, not yet famous for his Sherlock Holmes stories, enlisted on a whaling and sealing expedition to the Arctic, where he took part in the hunting of hooded seals – then known as bladder seals after the males’ extruded nostril membranes or “hoods” that give the species its name, and which inflate like a balloon in mating displays.
Conan Doyle saw his first hooded seal perched on the crest of an ice floe: “It was speckled black and white and lay on the ice as the ship steamed past, looking at it quietly. Poor brute, if they are all as tame it seems a shame to kill them.” But kill them they did. Conan Doyle recorded 1,216 seals killed in just one month of a seven-month hunt. Adults – most frequently females, as they refused to leave their pups – were shot. Bullets were not wasted on the young, which were clubbed.
Hunting hooded seals was halted in the north-east Atlantic population in 2007 but the hunt continues in Greenland.
