Seals & Sea lions

Most of these sounds were measured at more than 21 kHz, which is beyond the range of human hearing of 20 to 20,000 hertz. A particular high-pitched whistle came in at 49.8 kHz. When the seals harmonised multiple tones, the resultant sound may exceed 200 kHz, which is beyond what even cats and dogs can hear).

The discovery was the subject of a paper published online in the journal The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

The discovery of the extinct monk seal species came about after an international team of biologists examined seven fossil specimens (including a complete skull) found on south Taranaki beaches in New Zealand between 2009 and 2016.

Named Eomonachus belegaerensis, the new species was about 2.5m long and weighed around 200 to 250kg. It is believed to have lived in the waters around New Zealand three million years ago.

Some land animals like rats and shrews use their whiskers to explore, forage and move around. For the first time, a team of researchers, led by Robyn Grant of Manchester Metropolitan University, were able to show that pinnipeds too use their whiskers in a similar fashion.

The study, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A sought to measure and compare whisker movements and control amongst three pinniped species—California sea lions, harbor seals and Pacific walruses.

The Wildlife Trusts, which comprises 46 individual wildlife trusts around the country, reports record numbers of more than 800 sightings of whales, dolphins and seals in the waters of the United Kingdom in 2019.

Its Yorkshire project reported hundreds of individual sightings by trained citizen scientists. Among these were a pod of bottlenose dolphins making their way from Scotland to Flamborough Head in East Yorkshire-the farthest south they had been officially identified.

The negative effects of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals can be pronounced, such as lethal whale strandings coinciding with exposure to military sonar. Acoustic deterrent devices (ADDs) aim to elicit avoidance responses in aquatic predators, such as seals, and are currently being used to reduce depredation in fisheries. However, seals that have previously found fish at a location close to an ADD quickly habituate to these sounds.

If the hypothesis turns out to be true, it would represent the first evidence of such a trait in a marine mammal.

Randall Davis of the Department of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University, Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and another colleague, Lee Fuiman, associate director of the University of Texas' Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, have been studying the behaviour of Weddell's for decades.

A recent increase in grey seal strandings along the Cornish coast have left conservationists perplexed. According to The Cornwall Wildlife Trust, it has attended “twice as many strandings of seals as would normally be expected for this time of year”.