Seals and Fisheries in the Gulf of Maine

by
in Gray seals
on October 31, 2011

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to Provincetown, MA where I attended a seal/fishery interaction meeting hosted by the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. The meeting, sponsored by the WHOI Marine Mammal Center, brought together an diverse array of stakeholders interested in the growing gray seal populations in the Cape Cod region and elsewhere in the NW Atlantic. The meeting was a one day deal, with presentations in the morning and plenary discussion in the afternoon. I was really impressed by the people who attended. There were at least a dozen fishermen around the table, representing mobile and fixed gear fisheries, and I was especially impressed at the work being conducted by one of the wier fisherman. He has been working closely with PCCS scientists to study how grey seals interact with his weirs.

I was there to introduce a new project in our lab – the deployment of cell-phone tags on gray seals. These tags provide incredible detail on the movements of tagged animals, and are the perfect tool for beginning to study how seals use coastal and pelagic waters, and how their movements and foraging efforts may overlap in space and time with humans activities like fishing. This type of data is essential to any study of the ecological role of seals in the Gulf of Maine, and will provide a huge amount of information relevant to the study of operational interactions (by catch, depredation) between seals and fisheries in the local region. These tags are archival, but do not have to be recovered. Instead, when seals return to haul outs the tags call up the local cell network and essentially FTP the data off the tag to the researchers computer! We haven’t deployed any tags yet – but – when our seals call home, they may call home on America’s most reliable network <grin>.

The embedded video below provides an excellent example of the utility of these tags for studying the movements of pinnipeds. This movie illustrates the movements of a monk seal in the Main Hawaiian Islands as documented by one of these tags. Thanks to Charles Littnan for getting this stuff up on the web for people to see! Watch the video closely – you’ll see a yellow “worm” squiggling around the screen – that’s the path of the seal generated by the tag. Keep in mind, there is a whole whack of dive data associated with the track that is not displayed…

[photo size=’large’ link=’http://www.youtube.com/embed/YGEiEym2sRc’ icon=’play’ lightbox=’youtube’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2012/11/image6_650.jpg[/photo]