Category Archives for Seal

Tasmania’s salmon industry detonates underwater bombs to scare away seals – but at what cost?


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Benjamin J. Richardson, University of TasmaniaAustralians consume a lot of salmon – much of it farmed in Tasmania. But as Richard Flanagan’s new book Toxic shows, concern about the industry’s environmental damage is growing.

With the industry set to double in size by 2030, one dubious industry practice should be intensely scrutinised – the use of so-called “cracker bombs” or seal bombs.

The A$1 billion industry uses the technique to deter seals and protect fish farming operations. Cracker bombs are underwater explosive devices that emit sharp, extremely loud noise impulses. Combined, Tasmania’s three major salmon farm operators have detonated at least 77,000 crackers since 2018.

The industry says the deterrent is necessary, but international research shows the devices pose a significant threat to some marine life. Unless the salmon industry is more strictly controlled, native species will likely be killed or injured as the industry expands.

pile of grey and white fish
Tasmanian salmon farming is a billion-dollar industry.
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Protecting a lucrative industry

Marine farming has been growing rapidly in Tasmania since the 1990s, and Atlantic salmon is Tasmania’s most lucrative fishery‑related industry. The salmon industry comprises three major producers: Huon Aquaculture, Tassal and Petuna.

These companies go to great effort to protect their operations from fur seals, which are protected in Australia with an exemption for the salmon industry.

Seals may attack fish pens in search of food and injure salmon farm divers, though known incidents of harm to divers are extremely rare.

The industry uses a number of seal deterrent devices, the use of which is approved by the government. They include:

  • lead-filled projectiles known as “beanbags”, which are fired from a gun
  • sedation darts fired from a gun
  • explosive charges or “crackers” thrown into the water which detonate under the surface.

In June this year, the ABC reported on government documents showing the three major salmon producers had detonated more than 77,000 crackers since 2018. The documents showed how various seal deterrent methods had led to maiming, death and seal injuries resulting in euthanasia. Blunt-force trauma was a factor in half the reported seal deaths.

A response to this article by the salmon industry can be found below. The industry has previoulsy defended the use of cracker bombs, saying it has a responsibility to protect workers. It says the increased use of seal-proof infrastructure means the use of seal deterrents is declining. If this is true, it’s not yet strongly reflected in the data.



Read more:
Here’s the seafood Australians eat (and what we should be eating)

salmon farm infrastructure in water
Seal deterrents are deployed to protect salmon farm operations.
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Piercing the ocean silence

Given the prevalence of seal bomb use by the salmon industry, it’s worth reviewing the evidence on how they affect seals and other marine life.

A study on the use of the devices in California showed they can cause horrific injuries to seals. The damage includes trauma to bones, soft tissue burns and prolapsed eye balls, as well as death.

And research suggests damage to marine life extends far beyond seals. For example, the devices can disturb porpoises which rely on echolocation to find food, avoid predators and navigate the ocean. Porpoises emit clicks and squeaks – sound which travels through the water and bounces off objects. In 2018, a study found seal bombs could disturb harbour porpoises in California at least 64 kilometres from the detonation site.

There is also a body of research showing how similar types of industrial noise affect marine life. A study in South Africa in 2017 showed how during seismic surveys in search of oil or gas, which produce intense ocean noise, penguins raising chicks often avoided their preferred foraging areas. Whales and fish have also shown similar avoidance behaviour.

The study showed underwater blasts can also kill and injure seabirds such as penguins. And there may be implications from leaving penguin nests unattended and vulnerable to predators, and leaving chicks hungry longer.

Research also shows underwater explosions damage to fish. One study on caged fish reported profound trauma to their ears, including blistering, holes and other damage. Another study cited official reports of dead fish in the vicinity of seal bomb explosions.



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Climate change is causing tuna to migrate, which could spell catastrophe for the small islands that depend on them

dolphin jumps out of waves
Man-made noise can disturb a variety of marine animals, including porpoises.
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Shining a light

Clearly, more scientific research is needed into how seal bombs affect marine life in the oceans off Tasmania. And regulators should impose far stricter limits on the salmon industry’s use of seal bombs – a call echoed by Tasmania’s Salmon Reform Alliance.

All this is unfolding as federal environment laws fail to protect Australian plant and animal species, including marine wildlife.

And the laws in Tasmania are far from perfect. In 2017, Tasmania’s Finfish Farming Environmental Regulation Act introduced opportunities for better oversight of commercial fisheries. However, as the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) has noted, the director of Tasmania’s Environment Protection Authority can decide on license applications by salmon farms without the development necessarily undergoing a full environmental assessment.

Tasmania’s Marine Farming Planning Act covers salmon farm locations and leases. As the EDO has noted, the public is not notified of some key decisions under the law and has very limited public rights of appeal.

Two relevant public inquiries are underway – a federal inquiry into aquaculture expansion and a Tasmanian parliamentary probe into fin-fish sustainability. Both have heard evidence from community stakeholders, such as the Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection and the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, that the Tasmanian salmon industry lacks transparency and provides insufficient opportunities for public input into environmental governance.

The Tasmanian government has thrown its support behind rapid expansion of the salmon industry. But it’s essential that the industry is more tightly regulated, and far more accountable for any environmental damage it creates.



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Why Indigenous knowledge should be an essential part of how we govern the world’s oceans

In a statement in response to this article, the Tasmanian Salmonid Growers Association, which represents the three producers named above, said:

Around $500 million has been spent on innovative pens by the industry. These pens are designed to minimise risks to wildlife as well as to fish stocks and the employees. We believe that farms should be designed to minimise the threat of seals, but we also understand that non-lethal deterrents are a part of the measures approved by the government for the individual member companies to use. If these deterrents are used it is under strict guidelines, sparingly, and in emergency situations when staff are threatened by these animals, which can be very aggressive.

Tasmania has a strong, highly regulated, longstanding salmon industry of which we should all be proud. The salmon industry will continue its track record of operating at world’s best practice now and into future. Our local people have been working in regional communities for more than 30 years, to bring healthy, nutritious salmon to Australian dinner plates, through innovation and determination.The Conversation

Benjamin J. Richardson, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In a land of ancient giants, these small oddball seals once called Australia home


Artwork by Peter Trusler, Author provided

James Patrick Rule, Monash University; Erich Fitzgerald, Museums Victoria, and Justin W. Adams, Monash University

When most of us think of the prehistoric past, we envision a world of bizarre, often fearsome giants. From dinosaurs to mammoths and even penguins, life then seemed larger than life today.

Millions of years ago in Australia, giant goannas, kangaroos and diprotodontids (wombat relatives) roamed the landscape. The seas teemed with gargantuan predators such as the infamous “megalodon” shark and so-called giant killer sperm whales.

Fossils from this lost world can be found in sandstone rocks, between five million and six million years old, at Beaumaris – a bayside suburb in Melbourne and one of Australia’s most significant urban fossil sites. Here, fossils of ancient marine animals often wash ashore, eroded out of rocks by the tides.

However, some of these fossils are now revealing “jumbo” was not the only size for extinct animals. Our team’s research, published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reports nine new seal fossils from Beaumaris, which we suspect came from nine different individuals.

The findings paint a picture of a relatively small animal, making its way through a world of giants.



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More than doubling the seal fossil record

Melburnians have been collecting fossils from Beaumaris for more than 100 years. Yet it continues to produce remarkable and scientifically important finds.

A beach foreshore in Melbourne.
The fossils we studied were found on the foreshore of Beaumaris, Melbourne.
Erich Fitzgerald, Author provided

This includes extremely rare fossils of animals such as seals. Previously, scientists had studied only one seal fossil from this site.

The nine new fossils detailed in our research were collected and donated to Museums Victoria by local scientists and citizen scientists over the past 88 years. They have more than doubled the known fossil record of seals in Australia.

These fossils represent the oldest evidence of seals in Australia and were identified as “true seals”, a group mostly known from the Arctic and Antarctic. True seals belong to a different group to Australia’s fur seals and sea lions (eared seals), which only arrived in the region about 500,000 years ago.

Seal fossil specimens
In total, we found nine seal fossil specimens from Beaumaris, from potentially nine different individuals.
Erich Fitzgerald and James Rule, Author provided

In particular, one of the fossils we identified is a monachine (a southern true seal). Today, these are represented by animals such as leopard or elephant seals in the Southern Ocean surrounding the Antarctic, to which they are related.

Size estimates found the Beaumaris monachines to have been quite small, at only 1.7 metres long. This is similar to the size of today’s Northern Hemisphere seals such as the harbour seal.

However, the Beaumaris seal’s living relatives are much larger – usually 3m long or more. Modern leopard seals can grow to more than 3m long, while elephant seals can reach up to a gigantic 5m in length.

Most fossil whales found at Beaumaris are also smaller than their living counterparts.

This is the opposite trend to many other animal groups with fossils found there, including some sharks and seabirds, wherein the extinct animals were much larger than those alive today.

The extinct Beaumaris seal was much smaller than its living relatives today.
Art by Peter Trusler, Author provided

An uncertain future for marine life

Why is finding small seals at Beaumaris important?

Five million years ago, before the ice ages, the average annual temperature in southeast Australia was about 2–4°C warmer than it is today, with sea levels up to 25m higher.

These warmer oceans supported a greater diversity of marine megafauna than today, with longer but less energy-efficient food chains. These chains only had room for a few large top predators, such as megalodon sharks. And this may have limited the size of other top predators, including seals.

This chart shows the history of seals’ size evolution in Australia, compared to large sharks.
Peter Trusler and James Rule, Author provided

This is important. It suggests the large size of Antarctic seals living in the Southern Ocean today is due to colder oceans with more energy-efficient food chains, in which more food is available for marine animals.

If climate change continues to warm the oceans, food chains may once again start to become less energy efficient, resulting in a loss of the resources today’s large seals rely on for survival.

The discovery of seal fossils at Beaumaris has implications for not only unlocking the past, but also for contextualising the future.

It shows the biodiversity and ecology of marine megafauna off southern Australia originated during the long-term transition from a warmer to colder world – a process that only recently began changing trajectory.

To this day, the fossil site at Beaumaris continues to reveal scientifically important finds, thanks to members of the public working with scientists from Museums Victoria.



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The Meg: the ocean’s fossil record is a treasure trove for potential monster movies


The Conversation

James Patrick Rule, Palaeontology PhD Candidate, Monash University; Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator, Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museums Victoria, and Justin W. Adams, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dinner to die for: how fish use their spines to fend off hungry seals


Vincent Antony, Author provided

David Hocking, Monash University; Felix Georg Marx, Te Papa Tongarewa; Silke Cleuren, Monash University, and William Parker, Monash University

What price are you willing to pay for food?

For most of us, that’s a question about money. But what if the cost were actual pain, injury and death? For some seals and dolphins, this a real risk when hunting.

We took a close look at a New Zealand (or long-nosed) fur seal that stranded at Cape Conran in southeastern Australia, and discovered it had numerous severe facial injuries. These wounds were all caused by fish spines, and they show the high price these animals are willing to pay in pursuit of a meal.



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Victim or perpetrator?

When the unfortunate seal was first spotted dead on the beach, it was clear something was amiss: the animal was emaciated, and had a large fish spine stuck in its cheek.

Location where the seal was found in south-eastern Australia.
David Hocking

A team of scientists from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), Museums Victoria and Monash University decided to investigate, and took a CT scan of the seal’s head. The results were striking: fish spines had penetrated not just both cheeks, but also the nose and jaw muscles.

On closer examination, we also found ten stab wounds, likely from further fish spines that had been pulled out. The wounds were spread all over the face and throat, and at least some appear to have festered. They may have made feeding difficult, and ultimately may have caused the animal to starve.

These wounds were likely not the result of unprovoked attacks. They were probably inflicted by prey that simply did not want to be eaten.

3D computer models of the seal’s skull showing the position of the stingray barbs and ghostshark spines.
David Hocking

How to fight off a hungry seal … or at least teach it a lesson

Many fish species have evolved elaborate defence systems against predators, such as venomous spines that can inflict painful wounds.

Our seal appears to have been done in by two species of cartilaginous fish. One was the elusive Australian ghostshark (also known as elephant fish), a distant relative of true sharks that has a large serrated spine on its back.

The other was a stingaree: a type of small stingray with a venomous tail barb that can be whipped around like a scorpion’s tail. Its sting is normally aimed at would-be predators, but sometimes also catches the feet of unwary humans.

Deadly prey: the Australian ghostshark and stingaree, both armed with sharp venomous spines.
David Hocking
Sharp harpoon-like barb from the tail of a stingaree that was found embedded within the face of an unlucky New Zealand fur seal.
David Hocking, CC BY-SA

How to eat a spiky fish

Until recently, most of what we knew about the diet New Zealand fur seals was based on bony remains left in their poo. This technique largely overlooks cartilaginous fish, whose skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone. As a result, we didn’t realise fur seals target these creatures.

New studies of the DNA of devoured prey in the seals’ scats now suggest they commonly feed on ghostsharks. Stingarees and other rays are less common, but evidently still form part of their diet. So how do the seals handle such dangerous prey on a regular basis?

It all comes down to table manners. Ghostsharks and rays are too large to be swallowed whole, and hence must be broken into smaller chunks first. Fur seals achieve this by violently shaking their prey at the water’s surface, largely because their flippers are no longer capable of grasping and tearing.

Fur seals can eat small fish whole, but need to tear large prey into edible chunks.

Shaking a fish in the right way (for example by gripping it at the soft belly) may allow seals to kill and consume it without getting impaled. Nevertheless, some risk remains, whether because of struggling prey, poor technique, or simply bad luck. The wounds on our seal’s cheeks suggest that it may accidentally have slapped itself with a ghostshark spine while trying to tear it apart.

Australian ghostshark being eaten by an Australian fur seal belly first, thus avoiding the sharp spine on its back.
Photo by Vincent Antony
Australian ghostshark being eaten by an Australian fur seal belly first, thus avoiding the sharp spine on its back.
Photo by Vincent Antony

Fish spines – a common problem?

One of the challenges we face as scientists is knowing how to interpret isolated observations. Are fish spines a common problem for fur seals, or was our individual just particularly unlucky? We don’t know.

New techniques like analysing DNA from scats means that we are only just beginning to get a better idea of the full range of prey marine mammals target. Likewise, medical imaging techniques such as CT scanning are rarely applied to marine mammal strandings, and injuries like the ones in our seal may often go unnoticed.

CT scans of the jaws of a wedgefish (Rhynchobatus sp.) from Dean et al. (2017)
Dean et al. (2017)

Nevertheless, fish spine injuries have been observed in other ocean predators, including dolphins, killer whales, and rays. One wedgefish described in another recent study had as many as 62 spines embedded in its jaw! Now that we know what to look for, we may finally get a better idea of how common such injuries really are.

For now, this extraordinary example vividly demonstrates the choices and dangers wild animals face as they try to make a living. For our seal, the seafood ultimately won, but we will never know if the fish that killed it got away, or if the wounds they left are evidence of the seal’s last meal.



Read more:
When mammals took to water they needed a few tricks to eat their underwater prey


The Conversation

David Hocking, Postdoctoral fellow, Monash University; Felix Georg Marx, Curator Vertebrates, Te Papa Tongarewa; Silke Cleuren, PhD candidate, Monash University, and William Parker, PhD Candidate, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Deep impact: grey seals clap underwater to communicate



Ben Burville, Author provided

David Hocking, Monash University; Ben Burville, Newcastle University, and Felix Georg Marx, Te Papa Tongarewa

Have you ever clapped your hands to get someone’s attention? The resulting “crack!” sound is hard to ignore, rising above and penetrating through any background noise.

Now imagine trying to do it underwater – you would be unlikely to achieve quite the same impact.

Amazingly, new footage released this week in the journal Marine Mammal Science shows breeding grey seals doing just that: they clap at each other to warn off competitors and attract potential mates.

Grey seal clapping underwater. Filmed by Ben Burville as part of Project Grypus.

Why is this unusual?

Like their land-living relatives, marine mammals primarily communicate vocally – think of dolphin whistles or the famous song of humpback whales. Grey seals are no exception, and in fact can be surprisingly versatile.

Besides the bizarre “rup” and “rupe” calls these seals normally make in the wild (see the video below), some captive animals have even been trained to perform the Star Wars theme tune!

But vocals are only half the story. Many marine mammals also produce percussive sounds, such as by slapping the water with their flippers or tails. Normally this happens at the surface, and only involves one flipper at a time.

What makes grey seals different is that – like humans – they literally clap their forelimbs together, and they do it entirely underwater.



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The behaviour that took 17 years to film

Recording the claps was far from easy, and took no less than 17 years of scuba diving by “seal diver” and marine biologist Ben Burville.

Seal diver Ben Burville with one of his dive buddies – a wild grey seal off the Farne Islands, UK.
Photo provided by Ben Burville.

Ben was no stranger to the clapping sound itself. For years, he had heard it when diving with grey seals during their breeding season. Similar noises had also been detected by researchers using underwater microphones, but had been mistaken for a vocal signal.

It wasn’t until he actually saw a big male clapping together its paw-like flippers that Ben finally identified the true source of the sound. Yet the claps were quick and difficult to film; by the time he pointed his camera, things had usually moved on.

Years passed until finally, in October 2017, Ben caught the behaviour on film while diving near the Farne Islands, UK. A male grey seal performed seven claps right in front of him while his camera was rolling.

Grey seals use their short paw-like forelimbs to make loud clapping sounds underwater.
Filmed by Ben Burville. Illustrations by David Hocking.

Why do grey seals clap?

At first, the discovery might not seem that surprising. After all, seals are famous for performing this behaviour in zoos and aquaria. However, there is a crucial difference: whereas captive animals (usually fur seals or sea lions) have been trained to clap for our entertainment, grey seals do so in the wild and of their own accord.

So why do they do it?

Imagine being in a noisy room, with everyone around you chatting away. Getting attention can be difficult, unless you make a statement. That’s exactly what a clap is: a sharp, loud noise that rises above the background chatter.

Usually it’s males that do the clapping – sometimes by themselves, and sometimes at each other. Depending on the context, the claps may help ward off competitors and/or attract potential mates.

Similar functions underlie display behaviour in many other species. Think of a chest-beating male gorilla, for example. Like seal claps, those chest beats carry two messages: “I am strong, stay away”, and “I am strong, my genes are good.”

Male gorillas beat their chest as a show of strength to competitors and potential mates.

Do other marine mammals clap?

The short answer seems to be no, or at least not as far as we know. Clapping seems to be a genuinely novel behaviour that evolved in seals only once. Perhaps larger species such as sea lions are prevented from doing it by increased water resistance.

Australian sea lions have long flipper-like forelimbs that may create too much drag to clap effectively underwater.
Photo by David Hocking

Of course, it is also possible that some other species also clap, but haven’t done so in front of a camera.



Read more:
When mammals took to water they needed a few tricks to eat their underwater prey

Even if clapping were unique to grey seals, it seems the sharp signal it generates is important for many marine mammals. Several dolphins, whales and seals produce similar sounds via tail or flipper slaps, or even gunshot-like vocalisations. The oceans are a noisy place, after all, and it can be important to stand out in a crowd.

Wild harbour seal slapping the water to create a loud noise – possibly to scare fish out of hiding so that they can be caught.

What should we learn from this?

Clapping seals show us just how much we still don’t know about the remarkable mammals in our oceans. Clapping seems to be an important social behaviour, hence anything that disturbs it may impact breeding success and survival.

Human noise pollution is known to interfere with other forms of marine mammal communication, including whale song. Loud industrial noises could conceivably disturb grey seals (and other species that rely on acoustic signals) in similar ways.

But if we do not know a behaviour exists, we cannot easily act to protect it.

Understanding the animals around us better can therefore help us to protect them and their way of life.The Conversation


Photo by Ben Burville

David Hocking, Postdoctoral fellow, Monash University; Ben Burville, Visiting Researcher – Marine Biology, Newcastle University, and Felix Georg Marx, Curator Vertebrates, Te Papa Tongarewa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Buffet buddies: footage reveals that fierce leopard seals work together when king penguin is on the menu



A wild leopard seal on South Georgia.
James Robbins, Author provided

David Hocking, Monash University; Alistair Evans, Monash University, and James Robbins, Plymouth University

Some people don’t like sharing their food – we all have a friend who gets cranky when you steal a chip from their plate. For wild animals, this makes sense, because any food shared is energy lost that could otherwise have been used to pursue more food.

So it was a big surprise to discover wild leopard seals feeding alongside one another while eating king penguins at South Georgia, a remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean. On top of this, they may have even been cooperating with each other to eat these enormous seabirds.

Location of the study.
James Robbins

We report this fascinating observation in a new study published today in the journal Polar Biology.

Can’t we just all get along?

Leopard seals have a ferocious reputation as one of the top predators in the Antarctic ecosystem. They are infamously the “principal enemy of the penguin”, as immortalised in the film Happy Feet.



Read more:
When mammals took to water they needed a few tricks to eat their underwater prey

But when they eat penguins, leopard seals are normally highly territorial, scaring off rivals by lunging at them with a fearsome set of teeth. Animal-mounted cameras have even revealed that leopard seals ambush each other to steal captured prey.

But that’s not what was seen when the film crew working on the Netflix documentary series Our Planet visited South Georgia. Instead, they were astonished to find wild leopard seals floating alongside one another dining together on a king penguin carcass, taking it in turns to tear off pieces of food.

Too costly to fight

Given how aggressive leopard seals normally are around food, why were these seals behaving so out of character?

Consider this: if you were at an all-you-can-eat buffet and a stranger sat at your table and began eating your food, would you chase them away or let them share with you, knowing you could easily get more afterwards?

When food is very abundant, it may well be cheaper to share than to fight. Penguin colonies offer a near-constant supply of potential prey, attracting scores of predators. In this case, up to 36 leopard seals were seen near the colony at the same time.

So if a seal paused feeding to scare or fight off a rival, there is a good chance a third seal would sneak in and steal the food. In this situation it makes more sense to focus on eating as much as possible, as fast as possible – tolerating some food theft if necessary so as to avoid wasting energy on fighting that would risk losing the prey altogether.

The seals didn’t get along perfectly all the time. We saw some aggression, but perhaps this is to be expected if they are just tolerating each other out of necessity.

Even in our observations, the seals didn’t always get along – note the prey item floating in the water where it could easily be stolen by a third seal.
Dion Poncet

Do leopard seals cooperate to eat large prey?

Another explanation for these unexpected observations is that leopard seals might be cooperating to make it easier to consume such large prey.

Unlike northern seals, leopard seals don’t have clawed paws to help them hold prey. Instead, they have paddle-like flippers with tiny claws, forcing them to vigorously thrash the prey from side to side in their teeth to tear it into pieces small enough to swallow. This energy-intensive eating style is even harder when the prey is large – like adult king penguins.

Unlike northern seals, leopard seals have a paddle-like flipper that lacks the large claws needed to hold and tear food.
James Robbins
Tools of the trade: Leopard seals use their strong front teeth to kill penguins, while the trident-shaped cheek teeth act as a sieve for trapping tiny krill.
David Hocking

Alternatively, if two animals hold the prey between them, one can act as an anchor while the other tears off a chunk of meat. This saves a lot of energy that would otherwise be wasted shaking the prey around.

Group feeding behaviours filmed using a drone, showing two leopard seals dining together on an adult king penguin.
Illustration by Kai Hagberg. Photos by Silverback Films.

This type of cooperative food processing is actually quite common among aquatic top predators, such as killer whales and crocodiles, that can’t easily hold onto food.

The unusual case of the sharing seal

This last possibility made us rethink the interpretation of a famous encounter between a wild leopard seal and National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen. On entering the water, Nicklen was repeatedly approached by a seal that appeared to be trying to feed him a penguin in an act of unexpected altruism. But perhaps this was not a free gift, but an offer to cooperate.



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The birdlife of South Georgia is handed another chance

The latest discovery is a great example of how new technology can help researchers make close-hand observations of wild animals. By using a camera drone, the film-makers could fly above the animals without disturbing them, allowing them to observe behaviours that have so far gone unnoticed.

The remoteness of Antarctic ecosystems can make it hard to connect with the wildlife there, but these advances in technology are helping to provide new windows into this icy world. The Conversation

Wild leopard seal lunging at scavenging seabirds off Bird Island, South Georgia.
James Robbins

David Hocking, Postdoctoral fellow, Monash University; Alistair Evans, Associate Professor, Monash University, and James Robbins, Visiting researcher, Plymouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

USA: Alaska – Virus Infecting Wildlife


The link below is to an article reporting on growing concern over a possible virus that is spreading through wildlife off Alaska, infecting Walruses, Seals and Polar Bears.

For more, visit:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/walruses-seals-and-polar-bears-hit-by-mystery-virus-7626990.html