Shifting Fur Seals

The shifting baseline of northern fur seal ecology in the northeast Pacific Ocean was recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the authors discuss using baseline information as a way to understand fur seal distributions. Northern fur seals range from southern California to the Aleutian Islands. Today they breed almost exclusively on offshore islands at high latitudes (two-thirds on the Pribilof Islands alone) but in the past there were large populations off of California. The California population appears to have collapsed between 800 and 1000 years ago, long before contacts with European hunters. It's not clear that the cause was climatic.

But it's possible the California population is growing again. Last fall, 34 malnourished fur seal pups washed up on the shores of northern California (again, researchers are not sure why). They were taken in by the Marine Mammal Rehabilitation Center and last month, the fattened, healthy pups were released at the Farallon Islands. A short video on the process is here. Watch for the wonderful footage of sleeping fur seals (with their flipper curled--an act dubbed 'jug-handling').