Entanglement

I feel obliged in this particular post to give you a little bit of information about one of the problems we're facing on the Pribs. One of my jobs during the summer is to monitor the entanglement rate of seals on the island. Entanglement is exactly what it sounds like. Seals that are tangled in a variety of marine debris. The most common culprits are trawl nets and packing bands (you know, the plastic loops they put around boxes and crates sometimes). Entanglement is deadly to these seals because they continue to grow over their lifetime. As they grow, the object around their neck becomes tighter and cuts through their neck, eventually killing them. By monitoring for entangled seals, we can track whether the rate of entanglement is rising or falling, and hopefully have the opportunity to go in and cut some animals free. Unfortunately, most of the time there's nothing we can do, because we would have to disturb hundreds, if not thousands, to help that one.

The general wisdom is that most of the animals that find themselves entangled are young ones - and of those, mostly males. We certainly do see more young males that are entangled than females, but we still find females as well, occassionally even females with pups. The variety of debris that I've seen on seal necks is quite impressive - everything from our usual nets and packing bands to large rubber gaskets. The solution to this problem seems simple enough - just keep our trash out of the water.