OTTAWA - Around 1,500 seal pups were swept out to sea and drowned by a tidal surge off Canada's east coast this week after a lack of ice cover meant their mothers were forced to give birth on a small island, environment officials said on Friday.
A resident on the island described how the mother seals had frantically tried to push their tiny pups back on to land as they floundered in the storm-tossed water.
Grey seals in the Northumberland Strait - which lies between the provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island - usually give birth on the pack ice which forms in winter.
But abnormally warm conditions this year mean there is no ice in the strait, so some seals had to give birth on the beaches of Pictou Island. Unusually high tides hit the island this week after a major storm.
"The majority of those seals born above the high water mark have been lost. We're estimating ... that of about 2,000 pups that were born prior to the storm, we lost about 1,500," said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal adviser for the federal Fisheries and Oceans Department.
Television pictures showed dead seal pups littered on one of Pictou Island's beaches. Jane MacDonald, one of the island's few permanent residents, said the mother seals had tried hard to save their offspring.
"The mothers just push them and push them with their nose, and they dive back under and push them back up, and they get back into the tide wash, and then a big wave will hit and just sweep them back out to sea," she told CBC television.
Conway said it was not uncommon for seals in the Northumberland Strait to give birth on land.
"I've been with the department 27 years and I can remember at least half a dozens instances when there hasn't been ice of sufficient strength (for seals to give birth there)," he told Reuters from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
When seal pups are born they weigh only about 20 lbs (9 kg) and have no blubber, which means they find it hard to float.
Conway blamed the unusually high tide for the deaths, adding: "Normally, these pups would have survived."
The grey seal population in the Northumberland Strait and the Gulf of St Lawrence is around 400,000 animals.
Conway said the lack of ice cover off Eastern Canada could also cause problems for the large harp seal population, which usually gives birth in late March near the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
"I'm suggesting that unless we have a tremendous decrease in temperature and the forming of ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we may have a repeat of this with harp seals," he said. This could mean seals being forced to give birth on beaches on the Magdalen Islands and Prince Edward Island.
Story by David Ljunggren
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
