SUV’s Kill Baby Seals
Climate Change Catastrophe: Worst Ice Year on Record Leads to Harp Seals’ Demise
International Fund for Animal Welfare, PRNewswire-USNewswire, March 25 2010 [here]
CHARLOTTETOWN, Canada — Thousands of harp seal pups are presumed dead in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence and starving pups are being found abandoned on the beaches of Prince Edward Island, tragic victims of the worst ice conditions recorded in eastern Canada.
IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare – www.ifaw.org) reports that the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is the annual birthing ground of hundreds of thousands of harp seals, is essentially devoid of both ice and seals.
“The conditions this year are disastrous for seal pups. I’ve surveyed this region for nine years and have never seen anything like this,” said Sheryl Fink, a senior researcher with IFAW. “There is wide open water instead of the usual ice floes, and rather than the hundreds of thousands of seal pups that we normally encounter, only a handful of baby harp and hooded seals – animals that are normally found on ice – remain on the beaches.”
Extremely high pup mortality is expected this year, making this one of several such occurrences in the past decade. In 2007, 99% of harp seal pups born in the Southern Gulf of St Lawrence are thought to have died due to lack of ice. In 2002, 75% of pups are thought to have suffered the same fate. Scientists with IFAW are concerned that the cumulative effects of high pup mortality due to the poor ice conditions, and high numbers of pups killed during Canada’s commercial seal hunt could be devastating. … [more]
Note: Arctic ice extent it at its greatest since 2003 [here], just in case you want some facts to go along with the mindless hysteria.