#gray seals

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Have you ever seen two baby seals have a disagreement before?

Weever remains, including the bony otoliths of the inner ear (a standard identification of fish), were found in 4 per cent of the droppings, including one scat with remains of 76 of them, plus one sign of flatfish. The relatively high abundance of weever in a limited number of scats, the study concluded, was “some evidence for specialisation”.

It also suggested that the seals had developed a way of eating the fish without suffering from the venom. The skin inside a seal’s mouth and oesophagus is not especially thick compared with that of the leatherback turtle, which regularly eats jellyfish with toxic stings. Grey seals tend to eat fish whole, suggesting that they may have learned to gulp weevers head first, helping to push the poison spine flat.

The gray seal population in New England has bounced back, and new data points to how well seal numbers are doing.

Gray seal numbers had been decimated for more than a century when the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972. The animals were hunted in New England, and as NPR has reported, Massachusetts even paid a bounty of $5 each.

Though it has been clear that the population has grown in number, it has been difficult to pinpoint just how much.

"Past surveys based on traditional methods of counting, using occupied aircraft to survey seals on beaches, islands and seasonal ice cover, counted about 15,000 seals off the southeastern Massachusetts coast," David W. Johnson, a professor of marine conservation ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a statement.

Gray Seals, Once Hunted, Are Thriving In New England