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Well, ice seals, that's a, kind of a general or catchall term
for species of seals that are strongly associated with ice,
and in particular, seals that spend their reproductive season in the sea ice.
And on the Pacific side of the Arctic, in other words in Alaska waters,
we have four species that fall into that category,
and those are bearded, ringed, spotted, and ribbon seals.
The agency, NOAA, has been petitioned to list all of these species
as threatened or endangered under the ESA,
the Endangered Species Act.
There is a concern about these species because of their strong association with sea ice
and the concern about the fate of sea ice
in the disrupted and warming climate.
And they're very important as traditional resources of Alaska Native people.
So, most of the coastal communities in northern Alaska
depend on these species for food and cultural resources.
We've been working on these species since well before
the agency was asked to list them under the Endangered Species Act.
But the urgency has ramped up quite a bit
and so we've been working sort of extra hard in the last few years
to try to fill in some important gaps about just basic things
like their population sizes; like their numbers.
For example, we just completed a very large and intensive aerial survey of seals
throughout the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk.
And the results from that are going to provide, really,
the first reliable estimate of the numbers of these species in those areas.
And then the research cruises that we've had in the Bering Sea
have been really productive.
And a typical day out there would be we get to go out
and motor through and amongst the ice flows,
which is a really fantastically beautiful,
can't call it a landscape, I guess, a seascape and
when a boat spots a seal then we use radios
to sort of get the help of one or two of the other boats nearby and approach it,
trying to be really stealthy and just creeping up on the ice flow that it's on and then,
and getting out and running up to it with basically a big, it's like a fish landing net,
and trying to get the seal into the net.
So when we've caught a seal in the landing nets,
the procedures are all pretty benign.
It's measuring and weighing; taking some little swabs;
a little snip of skin from the hind flipper that tells us about their health and condition;
their genetic relationships to other seals; diseases; things like that,
and then putting on the tags, the tracking tags.
Typically we glue those tags to the hair of the seal
using a quick-setting epoxy or a kind of superglue.
And that allows us to track a seal for usually,
something on the order of eight to 10, maybe almost up to 12 months.
And one of the things we have to do under the Endangered Species Act
for any species that we list is designate what's called critical habitat,
in other words, the habitat that's essential for persistence and recovery of the species.
And so NOAA is in the process of drafting proposals
for critical habitat for ringed and bearded seals
and the satellite tracking work that we've done
has been a pretty important part of the scientific support
for what those critical habitat designations will eventually look like.
So one of our hopes is that the work that we're doing now,
and the data that we've been collecting,
will serve as a reference point in the future,
either in the near future or, in some cases, maybe the very distant future
for whether changes have taken place in these populations,
so that there will be enough quantitative information to make reliable,
sound decisions about listing, or hopefully delisting,
these species that have been given protection.