New Life on the Ice

The adult seals have arrived here from their summer feeding areas in the eastern Canadian Arctic and off West Greenland. They move ahead of the ice edge as it forms. They arrive at the southern end of their range in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off the coast of Newfoundland by early January.

The seals give birth from late February until mid-March, transforming the once barren ice floes into a huge, white nursery. The newborn pups – thin, wet and yellow at birth – will become fat, fluffy “whitecoats” in about a week, thanks to the high fat content of their mothers’ milk. Seal pups spend much of their time sleeping, and are so inactive that on sunny days the ice melts beneath them, creating body-shaped cradles on the ice surface.

Pups convert the fat in their mother’s milk into blubber, which helps to protect them from the cold. Blubber also gives pups energy to survive until they are strong enough to enter the water and search for their own food. Did you know that harp seal pups gain about 2 kg (4.4 lb) per day!

After about 12 days of nursing, the mothers will leave their fully fed pups and join adult males for the annual mating ritual. Later in the season the adult seals, along with many immature, non-breeding seals (called “bedlamers”), will haul out on ice further north to undergo the annual moult. They then continue their migration back to the subarctic waters between eastern Canada and West Greenland.

The newly-weaned pups remain on the ice, crying for their mothers at first, before becoming extremely quiet and sedentary. During this time they survive on the thick layer of blubber accumulated during nursing. Soon, they begin to moult their white coats, and can be seen rolling on their backs, rubbing the ice as if trying to scratch an unbearable itch. A few days later, their white coats will be lost entirely to reveal the sleek, black spotted, silvery pelt of the young harp seal pup known as a “beater.”

This whitecoated harp seal pup is protected ... for now. In about a week’s time – as soon as she starts to shed her white fur – she will be fair game for the sealers.

It is the pelt of the beater seal that is now the target for commercial sealers, who kill the seal pups for their fur, which is used to make fur coats and other luxury products. In recent years over harp 300,000 seal pups have been killed for their fur; over 95% of these pups are between two weeks and three months of age.