March 24, 2013 — In 1991, researchers counted six seal pups on Muskeget Island just northwest of Nantucket. In 2007 they counted 2,096.
That, in a nutshell, describes the trigger for this past Saturday's Outer Cape Seal Symposium. More than 200 scientists, fishermen, and other people involved in coastal activities gathered at the Chatham High School auditorium to learn, share, and work on a process for dealing with what can, at times, seems like a fish-eating flippered invasion.
Protected Mammals or Nuisance Animals?
From the 1880s until the 1960s, both Maine and Massachusetts used a bounty system to keep the state's fishing grounds seal-free. With a $1-5 payout for each seal nose turned in, hunters decimated the population of the region's gray and harbor seals.
With the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, the seals' status changed from pest to protected, although many in the fishing community continue to see the pinnipeds as a threat. Fishermen warn that infect fish with parasitic cod worms, steal fish from nets, weirs, and lines, compete for fish, and disrupts fish spawning.
Here to Stay
The first presentation of the morning left no doubt that gray seals have arrived and thrived. Lisa Sette from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies presented research that shows a healthy – and booming – northwest Atlantic seal population stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia.
Seals mature at the age of four and produce a pup a year. Seal bones and pelts appear in Native Amerian middens in the northeast, providing hints of historical range. With prime seal haul-out habitat like the sandy beaches of Muskeget Island and Monomoy protected and hunting outlawed, these adaptable and fast-breeding mammals have been returning to that range en masse.
Read the full story at Cape Cod Today