Save the Seals Campaign

Seals have been terribly impacted

As humans began sailing the seas, they found they could access the breeding colonies of slow-moving seals and kill them with impunity in great numbers. Initially they were killed for food, but then increasingly for fur, oil, and walrus tusks.

Indigenous peoples of the north survived largely on marine mammals, but did not take more than they needed to live, and existed in a respected balance with them. In contrast, there were no limits to the industrialized taking of seals.

And it continues today.

Kills around the world are conducted in order to ship seal penises to Japan, China and other asian nations in which they are considered “good for virility”. Even the USA ships seal penises – (to our crazy species, the most valuable part of a seal) – to asia. Seal pups are still bludgeoned to death in the hundreds of thousands worldwide for their fur. And entire herds of walruses have been found machine-gunned with their tusks chain-sawed out, to be traded for illegal drugs. Human “civilization” has not been good to the seals.

And this occurs at the same time the seals’ food has been overfished, that they are impacted by plastic debris which entangles them and plastic in the bellies of fish they swallow whole. That their bodies concentrate human-created toxic wastes which bioaccumulate up the food chain.

Really, aren’t seals worth more just existing, and keeping the seas healthy? We think so.

But the biggest danger since the seals’ evolved is none of these. And it’s coming.

And WE’RE CHANGING THE SEAS IN WAYS they can’t adapt to…

But those immediate and ongoing effects on the seals – as dire as they are – are not the ultimate threat to the existence of most species. That is coming from a more insidious direction.

The metabolic basis of human industry is now the burning of fossil carbon and hydrocarbons. We call them “fossil fuels” as if they exist to be burned. Yet continuing to burn them will clear the seas of seals. This may be “locked in” by 2050 or sooner, by the effects of ocean acidification and planetary heating, both effects of elevated biosphere CO2 from human burning.

The heating of the planet by CO2 has many effects. Coral bleaching, toxic algal blooms, and much more. Long-term, the disproportionate heat rise at the poles from greenhouse gasses means that ocean currents may slow and stop, creating stagnant oceans with anoxic depths, which increasingly are inhabited by purple bacteria giving off toxic hydrogen sulfide gas, implicated in past mass extinctions.

Yet long before that, we will have made the seas unlivable for most large complex life, due to the “evil twin” of global heating caused by CO2. That’s ocean acidification, and it’s happening new. Already at high latitudes where most seals exist, organisms at the base of the ocean food chains are having their shells dissolve in acidic seas. And it’s spreading.

For as the oceans soak up CO2, it is converted into carbonic acid. This is a big problem, because many organisms in the seas rely on skeletons and shells made of different crystal structures of calcium carbonate. These animals, including the world’s coral reefs, will fizz away like an antacid tablet in a glass of cola. These animals are integral to the food webs which support large complex animals like fish and marine mammals. There is utterly no reason to believe that a wholesale collapse of ocean food webs will spare large carnivores. Indeed, the large, long-lived species with low reproduction rates are least likely to survive.

Rather, we’re creating the conditions for jellyfish seas, worms, and bacterial slimes.  Creatures which are adapted to rapid changes by being durable and by reproducing prolifically and quickly. A seal, or other high-metabolism creature like a fish, can’t survive by eating jellyfish – the nutrient level and calories just aren’t there.

And of course, changing the seas in such a way means that humans won’t get anything except jellyfish and algae out of them either. The sealss aren’t our competitors, they’re showing us an important truth: humans have never existed during a time of stagnant, toxic seas either. We, like the seals, have evolved since that last happened. It can take millions of years for coral reefs to come back to the earth once acidity destroys them; and a huge percentage of fish need coral reefs to reproduce.

This dire sequence of events could be locked in by 2050 or before. A child in school today could outlive coral reefs, and outlive seal species. And once the CO2 is released, the seals won’t have any ultimate hope, even if the acidification-caused food-web changes take a long time to kill them. At that point it will be inexorable.

And some species may not even live that long, for another inevitable effect of CO2 is sea level rise. It’s slow but also inexorable. We hear about it as a problem for beachfront property owners. We seldom think about the endangered monk seals of the Pacific, whose existence now depends on remote breeding atolls only a couple feet above sea level. They are one of the hidden costs of unsustainable human excess.

To save the seals and the seas, we need to do the stuff we need to do anyway for climate change, but we need to do it faster.