CANADA/FILE: Warmer than usual weather threatens Canada's Atlantic coast seal hunt

The first stage of Canada's controversial annual harp seal hunt is in jeopardy because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned, officials and animal rights activists say. The first part of the hunt, which had been due to start today (March 28), occurs in the Gulf of St Lawrence to the south of the Magdalen Islands on Canada's East Coast. Hunters move across the ice floes, shooting and clubbing to death young seals. Rebecca Aldworth, observer with the U.S. Humane Society, said the ice floes had started to break up before the seals learned how to swim properly. "We know that all the harp seals born in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence this year were actually blown out into the Atlantic Ocean, and that's more than 260,000 pups," she said. "We anticipate that the ocean swells and the high winds out there are going to break up that ice and force those pups into the water and they are not old enough to survive." The Canadian fisheries ministry confirmed the increased mortality earlier this week. The Humane Society said unusually warm weather meant the ice cover south of the Magdalen Islands was almost completely missing, adding it feared thousands of harp seal pups had drowned. "It was absolutely devastating to see the ice habitat these seals rely on absolutely destroyed. There is no solid ice out there in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there is not a seal to be found out there. This is my ninth year out there observing the commercial seal hunt, I have never seen ice conditions this bad," Aldworth said. Observers said some of the seals had been blown due east into the Cabot Strait between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, though it's believed a few could eventually make their way back to the Magdalen Islands. Scientists say this year's conditions point to a larger, documented climate trend in the western north Atlantic and southern Arctic oceans. "The sea ice, the shrinkage in the last ten years or five years has been dramatic enough to cause specialists to exclaim," said Phillip Arkin, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Climate Studies at the University of Maryland. "I've heard them do so, 'Wow, look at this.' As a scientist, you have to be cautious about this sort of thing, because you can come away with impressions that aren't supported by all the facts. So every scientist, when they get that kind of impression, they re-check and they look at their data. And in this case we see this change and it is dramatic and it's impressive." Among scientists' concerns is the state of the permanent ice cover, which is even further north but provides a key form of ecological stability to the entire region. "What people have noticed recently is that, more and more of it is melting," Arkin added. "And so the last few summers, while there's still a permanent ice cover over the Arctic Ocean, it's a lot smaller. The area covered is a lot smaller than it once was. And that is provocative, because then the question is: might it actually disappear? Could we have a summer or sometime in the next few years or twenty years where the ice entirely melts from the Arctic Ocean?" Last December, a research team at the University of Colorado, Boulder published a study that estimated Arctic ice shrinkage to be 38,000 square miles per year, which they linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in Arctic sea ice. Despite warmer conditions, the main portion of the Canadian seal hunt is expected to proceed as usual. The main part of the hunt takes place in April off the northern and western coasts of Newfoundland, where ice conditions are average. Canada says the seal population is a healthy 5.5 million animals and says the cull is needed to keep numbers under control. Last year's overall quota was 325,000 seals. Activists say the hunt is cruel and unnecessary and want it to be scrapped. Later this week, officials in Ottawa are likely to spell out this week how many seals may be killed.

ITN Source | March 29, 2007

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