License hunting for seals threatens the tribe's survival in the Baltic Sea

Published March 30, 2024 at 1:02 p.m.

Domestic. With today's hunting quotas of around 3,000 animals, we risk exterminating the gray seal in the Baltic Sea. That's according to a new study based on statistics from the 20th century seal hunt.

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After a century of hard hunting and environmental toxins like PCBs, there were finally of the 1970s, only 5,000 gray seals remained in the entire Baltic Sea out of the 90,000 that existed at the beginning of the century.

Since then, the tribe has recovered, and today amounts to around 55,000 animals, if you combine all countries' accounts.

As the seal tribe has grown, so has the conflict with the fishing industry, and in 2020 the protection hunt was completed with a license hunt in Finland and Sweden. In total, it is about 3,000 animals that may be shot.

But license hunting is controversial. It is reminiscent of the controversial hunting of lynxes that Sweden has granted, where every ten lynxes are to be killed after complaints from sheep and goat farmers in the sparsely populated Swedish countryside.

However, the seal population is still larger than the supply of fur. The genetically isolated Baltic gray seal has adapted to the unique conditions. They are somewhat smaller and can give birth to young on the drift ice in the northern Baltic Sea.

But now the researchers show with a mathematical model that the increased hunting of seals may be what causes the population to decline again. Something that could threaten its survival in the long run.

– The seal population is now growing, but our research shows that if today's hunting quota of 3,000 animals per year is met, the gray seal's survival in the Baltic Sea will again be threatened, says Daire Carroll, researcher at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of a study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

The countries around the Baltic Sea have agreed that the gray seal tribe should be allowed to recover after being almost extinct in the 20th century due to hunting and environmental toxins. The conflict with fishermen meant that there was a bounty on seals in the first half of the last century, and thanks to that there are detailed statistics on how many seals were killed year by year.