The industrial sealing era of the 1800s decimated our native seal populations, pushing them close to extinction in the US, and putting millennia of indigenous seal-hunting culture in jeopardy. Now, as tens of thousands of grey and harbor seals return to New England waters, it’s drawing the attention of fishermen and biologists alike, often for the wrong reasons. Given their rapid comeback, is there now a reason to resume the hunt, despite all the controversy that may come with it?
A History of Seal Hunters
Before addressing the complexities of modern seal management, let’s look at the heyday of US seal hunting. The indigenous peoples of North America have hunted seals for at least 4,000 years, though likely as far back as 16,000 years, dating back to the first people entering North America through the Beringian kelp highway. Seal meat and blubber would have been the backbone of a coastal indigenous diet, the meat being incredibly nutrient-dense, rich in omega 3’s, iron, protein, vitamin B, and D3. It’s also relatively lean. For many, it’s still an integral part of the local diet, including Lori McCarthy, a Newfoundland local and avid consumer of seal meat.
“Seal meat is a traditional food staple in Newfoundland and Labrador, used for centuries to sustain ourselves on the land,” McCarthy said. “To our people, it’s a critically important source of sustenance and an ingrained part of the culture and traditions that our province holds dear.”
European ships first came in search of seals in the early 1600s, but large-scale harvest didn’t begin until the early 1800s, driven primarily by the demand for hides and blubber. Seal hides in particular were very valuable for hats, coats, and mittens adorned by wealthy urbanites. At its peak, some 14,000 sealers were harvesting more than 700,000 ringed, harbor, and grey seals each year. Combined with a substantial subsistence harvest and more unrecorded commercial take, seals were being taken faster than the population could grow. Ultimately, over-harvesting decimated grey and harbor seal populations—a 1973 survey sighted only 30 grey seals across the coast of Maine.
Undoubtedly, something had to change.
The Consequences of a Seal Revival
The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) in 1972 was an unmistakable success for North American grey and harbor seal populations. It gave marine mammals a blanket of protection, saving several species from extirpation. Over the past 40 years, it’s allowed both species to recolonize and thrive along hundreds of miles of coastal habitat from strongholds in Canada. Now, up to 50,000 grey seals and 61,000 harbor seals live in US waters, up from probably a few hundred of each in the 1960s and 70s. Those numbers continue to grow today, with some breeding colonies growing by 12 to 16% per year.
The return of seals to the New England coastline is a positive change, as both species are keystone predators, snacking on small- to medium-sized fish and crustaceans, while also serving as prey themselves for great white sharks and resident orca pods. Like any species, though, that positive impact can quickly become negative when populations begin to swell.
Over the past 10 years, the growing population of seals has started to interfere with commercial fishing operations, with reports of seals stealing fish off longlines and jumping into trawling nets to gorge themselves on fish. In an industry where fishermen already struggle to make ends meet while still fishing sustainably, it’s understandable to see how this intrusion impacts their way of life.
The seal’s impact on the wider ecosystem is also in question. To maintain that huge layer of blubber below their skin, seals have to consume inordinate volumes of fish and crustaceans. The best science behind how much they eat comes from Norwegian scientists, who found that gray seals were consuming around 3.3 metric tonnes of fish a year, more than 12 times their body weight. For a total population of 50,000 grey seals, that’s more than 165,000 metric tonnes of seafood, the equivalent to the total seafood consumption of 19 million Americans.
But that number still may not represent the true impact. While a large part of their diet comes from the abundant capelin (a small baitfish), when it comes to larger species like cod, Atlantic salmon, and groundfish, seals employ “belling biting,” a hunting tactic where they only eat the calorie-dense belly and internal organs of the fish and discard the rest. It’s a wasteful yet efficient technique that vastly inflates their footprint, especially considering it affects valuable species that Americans love.
Learning from our Canadian Neighbours
While the US outlawed seal hunting in its waters, save from a few restricted indigenous permits, Canada took a different route to rehabilitate its seal numbers. Instead of an outright ban, they maintained their seal-hunting culture, both for commercial and indigenous substance hunters, but changed their harvesting practices to guarantee sustainability. It mirrors similar changes that North American hunters made for the benefit of game mammals like elk, deer, and ducks around the same time, and allowed the seal hunting culture of North America to survive the MMPA.
The Canadian seal hunt has become one of the most tightly regulated hunts in the world, with a litany of licenses, quotas, and monitoring of populations constantly enforced across the spring sea ice. The commercial harvest quota for the 2022 season was 400,000 harp seals (though just 273,000 were harvested), just 5.2% of the 7.6 million harp seals that inhabit the north-western Arctic. Portions of that quota are allocated first to indigenous peoples and local personal harvest, with the remainder allocated to commercial harvest.
This increased regulation has resulted in the return of grey and harp seals to their historic range, with seal populations now close to their historic highs, with unintended consequences. In 2014, researchers analyzed the stomach contents of harvested seals and estimated that their population seafood consumption could be nearly 4.9 million metric tonnes. For perspective, the total commercial seafood harvested in Newfoundland and Labrador was just 3.5% of that, at 176,234 tonnes in 2020. In select instances, seals have been found with over 181 egg-bound snow crabs in their stomach at one time, suggesting their diet has a far greater impact than we ever thought.
Their health is also showing signs of deterioration with increased populations. Dion Dakins, a commercial fisherman and sealer for the past decade, stated, “Since crossing the 5.4 million harp seals in 2014, researchers have noticed that females are now 20% lighter during critical stages in their pregnancy cycle and are producing their first pup two years later than normal. Even late-term abortions have increased by 200%.”
With climate change impacting the regularity and occurrence of the ice that seals depend on, this level of overpopulation now threatens the species’ ability to adapt to a changing environment.
This mounting body of evidence of overpopulation in both harp and grey seals has encouraged the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to form the Atlantic Seal Science Team, whose 2022 report backed up many of these claims already made by past research. Their recommendations to continue the current harvest rates, and to continue researching their wider impacts on already troubled fish species like Atlantic cod and Atlantic salmon, indicate that their growing impact is to be taken seriously.
The Canadian model of seal management offers US wildlife managers an insight into the future of our situation and provides us with a viable alternative to the protectionist model of seal management that we currently abide.
Emotions Clashing with Science
Our modern relationship with seals is a far cry from the one our ancestors had with them. Now, seals are nothing but cute, cuddly, and harmless cartoon animals or stuffed toys. This unfounded empathy is something that many animal rights organizations have historically bent to suit their will. This began in 1968 when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation started a film campaign to capture the “barbarity” of the seal hunt and garner public support for the ban. Later it was revealed that the network paid a local fisherman to purposely torture and maim seals in ways that regulations expressly forbade, solely for dramatic effect.
Today, organizations like Greenpeace and the Humane Society continue to fight against the will of the region's Inuit people, who rely on the cash sale of seal pelts to buy essential supplies like fuel and food. The impacts of Greenpeace’s anti-seal campaign were so severe on indigenous economies that Greenpeace was forced to publicly apologize for misrepresenting their culture and harming their way of life. Given this history of animosity between animal rights groups and seal hunting, one can expect that its return to US waters would draw massive contention—perhaps its biggest barrier to implementation.
Hunting as a Tool for Management
Like the management of cherished game species like deer, elk, and ducks, the objectives of each management program and the laws that uphold it need to evolve with the times. While the MMPA was critical for recovering historical seal populations at the time of its implementation, its purpose in the modern sense may need to change. Rather than a blind blanket of protection, it could instead continue to support the health of populations by maintaining the low rates of illegal and unethical persecution, as it has for the past 45 years, while also opening up carefully managed harvests by the public to keep populations within the habitat’s carrying capacity.
Legal hunting would give us the ability to take a more hands-on method of management, as well as bring back traditions nearly lost to the annals of time. If grey and harbor seal populations continue to follow the same population trends, a failure to act on our part could cause considerably more harm than good, both for the marine ecosystem itself and for the people that depend on it.
