different types of seals

There are three exclusively northern genera of small seals-theCommon Seal, the Grey Seal, and the rare and odd Bearded Seal. There are four very distinct and two additional species in the first genus but only one in each of the latter.

The best-known species is usually called the Harbor Seal and isdistributed all over the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans ranging from the ice-front (which the animals do not make use of), to the Mediterranean and southern New Jersey in the Atlantic, and to Cali­ fornia and Kamchatka in the Pacific. They are small animals, averaging aboutsix feet long, that live in small colonies of a few families about fixed locations all along the coasts and especially where there are rocks, andabout islands. Nonetheless, these seals often come swim­ ming by sandypublic bathing beaches and they are occasionally met with far out to sea.

Generation after gen­eration will be born about the same cove or rocky promontory and none appears to leave though they live to a considerable age. There may be miles of suitable coast for seals without colonies, and then half a dozen will be found close together in a small area. They preferstill water and bays and they ascend rivers to completely fresh water, andeven enter the Great Lakes. They spend some time ashore at every tide and the young are born in late May at night on the rocks. They are fish-eaters but take other food and they are inordinately inquisitive and friendly. They tame easily, are very gentle and sometimes quite pathetic in their attachment to human beings. They are a variable yellowish-grey in color and lighter below. The young are yellow but lose their baby underwool within a few hours of birth.

The second species of this genus is the "hair-seal" of the fur trade,known as the Greenland, Harp, or Saddlebacked Seal. This is found farther north than the last in the Atlantic and Pacific. They are migratoryto the extent that they all assemble at a few points to breed on the icefloes in spring before these convenient float­ ing rafts melt away. Notable points are off the Jan Mayen Islands, and at the mouth of the St.Lawrence River. The young, born on the ice, are clothed in a pure-whitefluffy coat and it is for this that they are butchered in the most atrocious manner, being clubbed and peeled, often before they are dead.

That anyone could kill these tiny helpless creatures with their enormous,pleading, liquid, black eyes even for the profit motive is clear proof that Man's patiently developed and much vaunted moral concepts are acomplete failure. Left alone, the young keep this coat for some weeks butthey then pass through a whole series of color changes lasting five years,and end up a pale creamy yellow with a large black mask and a large,dark brown, lozenge-shaped ring around their backs. Where these seals go through­ out the rest of the year is unknown but they scatter far and wide over the oceans and sometimes appear off coasts in enormous loosecompanies.

species found in, of all unexpected places, the half-salt Caspian Sea and the entirely fresh-water Lake Baikal in Siberia. How they got there is a mystery and more espe­cially in the case of the Caspian animals, for it is a very long time even geologically speaking since that sea was connected to any northern ocean. The last species of this genus is perhaps the most extraordinarily colored and marked of all mammals. It is a small, chocolate­ brown animal found only in the Bering Sea and adja­ cent parts of the Arctic Ocean but it has vivid yellow rings right round its neck, around the front-flippers where they join the body, and some distance in front of the tail. It is known as the Ribbon Seal and is usually taken off Alaska and the Aleutians.

The third species-the Ringed Seal-is the smallest of the genus and isdark grey above with numerous oval white rings, and light grey below. Itis more slender than the Harbor Seal and has proportionately much longer iimbs. Its habitat is the true Arctic waters of both east and west hemispheres, and since it stays in one place from year to year while theseplaces freeze up ev­ery fall, the animals have developed the habit of making potholes in the ice as it freezes and descending and as­ cending through these to fish throughout the winter. Closely related to the Ringed Seal are two very similar

This is a much larger animal, males reaching well over twelve feet, and is somewhat different in habits, be­ ing more sluggish and preferring open, exposed rocks where there is a constant swell and surf. It is a compara­tively rare animal, confined to the North Atlantic, where it staysin a belt south of the ice and north of temperate latitudes. It is commoner on the European than the American side of the Atlantic, ranging fromnorthern Norway to south Scotland and Ireland. It apparently shunsoceanic islands but appears again about Greenland and is sometimes found on Nova Scotia. It is of a shiny steel-grey color, dappled with lighter and darker diffuse marks. Unlike all other seals it gives birth in thefall. It is a shy lone creature endowed with in­ credibly acute hearing.

This is the largest, rarest, and oddest of the northern Seals, found onlyoccasionally from Newfoundland to the Arctic, and in some areas along the Alaskan coast. Specimens are still found around Iceland and they occa­ sionally appear off the Scandinavian coast; there are also reputed to be colonies in the Sea of Okhotsk. It is a very thick-skinned animal that spends most of its time alone on the high, seas and stays in the coldest water near the ice. It appears to be a squid-eater and has very small teeth most of which drop out before the animal is in any way old. It is of a dull grey color but is notable for its exaggerated moustache of enormous, flattened, and slightly curved whiskers. Bearded Seals are hunted by Eskimos for their tough hide and tender flesh and they display amost singular trait when shot, leaping into the air and turning a complete back somersault from the ice into the water, so that one never knows if they are dead or alive.

One, two, or possibly three species of small dark brown seals are found in warmer waters and constitute a distinct sub-family. There is onespecies that occurs in the Mediterranean, about the Straits of Gibraltar, and down the west coast of Africa to the Bissagos Islands, as well as on the Canaries and Madeira. Another species used to be rather common in the Caribbean, where it was first recorded by Christopheren Colon on his first voyage. It was subsequently hunted almost to extinc­ tion but is still found on some isolated islands off Cuba, Jamaica, and south Hispaniola.There appears also to be a small True Seal in the Indian Ocean withheadquarters around the Chagos Archipelago but noth­ing specific is known about it. Monks have small claws on all the fingers and toes butthese may be missing from the two outer toes which are much longer than the others. They are open water fish-eaters and appear to live in colonies about fixed rookeries.

There are four genera of seals exclusive to the Ant­arctic. They are obviously of common origin and they differ markedly from the Northern Seals in several respects. There is only one species in each genus.

These are small seals, colored a uniform olive brown above but with yellow cheeks and undersides. They stay by the Antarctic coasts alongthe ice-front, and also around islands off the coast, and appear to be, as their popular name implies, crab-eaters. However, their teeth are very remarkable, there being small front teeth, long slender tusks, and then five cheek-teeth on each side of each jaw, all divided into three sharp points arranged fore-to-aft. This mechanism looks much more like a device for catching slippery items like pelagic fish or squids rather than for crushingcrabs. These animals have no claws at all on the back feet.

Of much wider range is the somewhat fearsom& Leopard-Seal or Sea-Leopard. This ranges from the pe­ riphery of the Antarctic Continent northwards in all directions to the southern coasts of South America, Australia, and New Zealand, and is seen off the Marie Islands south of the Cape of Good Hope. The animal is about twelve feet long when fully grown and has the longest, most formidable jaws of any seal. The front teeth are long and sharp, with big slender tusks or ca­nines but the cheek-teeth are shaped like tridents.

The skin is usually dingy brown with some dark brown and many lighter spots but specimens colored very much like leopards are sometimes taken, the whole pelt being yel­ low with quite vivid black spots that are sometimes hol­low and contain white areas. These seals do not migrate but they do sometimes foregather in enormous crowds, when they may travel long distances in company and then vanish. This species will attack animals that land on or fall into water and they will feed on scraps from whaling operations on the high seas.

This little known but apparently not uncommon Ant­ arctic seal is obviously specialized in certain respects for a particular life in some as yet unexplained niche. Its eyes are proportionately very large-in fact enormous -and its teeth are small and weak. Its coloring is re­ markable in that the back is greenish and the belly yel­low but the sides are marked with bright yellow stripes running obliquely from top-front to back-bottom. The animal is a bottom feeder taking seaweed as well as the smaller soft-bodied animals. It ranges north to the same extent as the Sea-Leopard. When on the ice it has a strange habit of flattening itself out until it is almost disc-shaped.

This seal is rather like the Sea-Leopard, being pale grey above spotted with yellow or white, and pure yel­ low below. It is found on the pack ice and occasionally on the coasts of extreme southern South America, theSouth Orkneys, Shetlands and Georgia, and on the Falklands. It is a shore animal and the commonest seal of the Antarctic. Curiously, it also has rather excessively large eyes and weak teeth.

These remarkable animals come in two very distinct lines-one, a fairlynormal seal-like creature except for its head; the other, an altogether unique form known commonly as the Sea-Elephant. The former is confined to the upper North Atlantic from a line drawn fromNewfoundland to Norway and north to the ice-front. The Sea-Elephants were formerly found in vast herds on almost all the islands around the Antarctic Ocean, namely in the southern South Atlantic, the Indian, andperhaps the South Pacific Oceans. They also had colo­ nies up the west coast of South America almost to the tropics. Then, isolated colonies also dwelt on islands off the coast of California far to the north.

When fully grown these seals are about eight feet long. In color they are some shade of bluish-grey to black, with small irregular and diffuse white spots all over the back. They have small, rather weak, peglike teeth, very small foreflippers and extraordinary hind feet shaped like fans, the two outer toes being enor­ mous, clawless and bearing long flaps of flesh continu­ ous with the webbing. The males gradually develop over some years a most remarkable bladder-like excrescence on the top of the muzzle that is partly supported by a median ridge of bone, is hollow and is connected with the nasal passages. This can be inflated at will and, with it, horrible watery noises can be produced. The young are pure white and fluffy. Crested Seals live in large family parties on the open sea and migrate north and south with the seasons, the young being born on the icein March far out to sea.