Seals are thriving — but are there too many of them?

Times

3 days ago

'There is no creature born … which more resembles a human baby in its ways and its cries than a baby grey seal,' the British ecologist Frank Fraser Darling once said. The subtitle of Alix Morris's thoughtful book about the return of the seal to North America holds that these are the sea's most charismatic creatures, and that insistence does feel like a bit of a stretch, given the competition. Yet clearly Morris is enamoured by their 'liquid eyes,' their 'doglike faces' and their bodies like 'blubbery bananas'. Perhaps this is why a seemingly innocuous creature has ignited furious debate over what our relationship to the natural world should be.
There are also charming stories in her book's opening chapters of seals who have touched human lives. There is Hoover, who learnt to mimic the New England accent of the man who adopted him — 'Get outta there!' — and Andre, who would migrate hundreds of miles up the east coast each spring to the harbour of the man who first took him in.
It is all too usual in environmental journalism to read about devastating declines, but the seal is a story bucking that trend. By the mid-20th century grey seals and Atlantic harbour seals (what we know in the UK as the common seal) had been almost eradicated from US waters, pushed to the brink by bounty hunters, acting to protect commercial fish stocks.
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Yet now they are thriving: there are 61,000 harbour seals off the east coast of the United States, and 28,000 greys. The grey seal population on Sable Island — 95 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia — has risen from a few thousand animals in the 1960s to 400,000 today.
Such narratives give a tantalising glimpse of nature's capacity to heal, if only we would let it. In A Year with the Seals we learn about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the groundbreaking US legislation that turned around the fortunes not just of seals but of certain whales as well. We spend time with the women of the Marine Mammals of Maine, a group dedicated to the rehabilitation of seals, rescuing them from fishing nets and botched shark attacks and enthusiastic beachgoers in search of a selfie with a pup. I am forever impressed, despite our deserved reputation as a cruel, destructive species, by this capacity to attend to the needs of other creatures in ways that are unparalleled in any other animal.
But the book really hits its stride, and broadens its message, when it begins to tackle the complexities of conservation. It isn't hard to feel compassion for a species on the verge of extinction because, almost by definition, there aren't enough of them to cause any bother. It is when conservation measures have some success that conflicts with people arise. An animal's resurgence can feel like an invasion to those who have grown up without them, even if their numbers are still a long way off from their historic population.
I have spent a long time researching wolves, whose rapid return to Europe has caused no end of conflict, but even a creature as apparently benign as a seal has its passionate detractors. There are the commercial fishermen who see seals as competition, and sport fishermen who repeatedly lose their catch before they can reel them in. There is an enlightening section set outside Seattle, where the Puyallup tribe believes seals and sea lions are endangering salmon stocks.
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Most powerful is the rise in fatal attacks by great white sharks, attributed to an explosion in seal numbers along the coast, luring in the sharks that hunt them. 'No sharks or seals are worth a young man's life,' one local resident said in a town hall meeting in 2018, held after a surfer's death off the coast of Massachusetts. It is a brave biologist who would argue otherwise.
Morris asks: what is the right amount of any species? The natural amount? Removing conservation measures from an animal that has successfully rebounded risks plunging it 'into a continuous loop of depletion, conservation and recovery', and yet allowing their numbers to keep on climbing means adapting our lifestyles to make space for them — not something that we are particularly good at.
Ultimately, wildlife conflicts are 'a manifestation of deep-rooted social conflicts': urban versus rural, hunters versus conservationists, those who work the land versus the tourists who visit for some notion of the wild. The seal is a 'particularly convenient scapegoat' for such underlying tensions. In the end the answer to Morris's question of how much is enough isn't really about the species at all, but humans and what sort of relationship we want to have with the natural world.
In short, it's complicated. Maybe that's an unsatisfactory conclusion, but I am still surprised how often those working in conservation fail to appreciate that others with skin in the game have opinions that deserve to be heard. A Year with the Seals is a useful, all too rare account by a writer who has made the time to listen.
Adam Weymouth is the author of Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe (Hutchinson Heinemann)
A Year with the Seals by Alix Morris (Ithaka £18.99 pp304). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.