The community of Gambell fought a distemper outbreak among its dog population this spring and managed to squash the epidemic in its early onset. Distemper is a deadly disease that can afflict dogs and wildlife alike and also has been documented in the North Atlantic to jump from dogs to marine mammals like seals.
Verified reports of deaths and circumstantial evidence animals trapped in ‘bycatch’
Near Nome, reports of seal pups and walrus calves hauled out on beaches are piling up at an unprecedented rate.
Dozens of walruses were found dead earlier this month at their seasonal haulout near Point Lay. The findings came just about a day after locals said they saw an airplane they believed to be flying inappropriately over the herd, which comes to shore each year once the sea ice recedes past the continental shelf and it becomes too deep for them to feed.
Alaska Sea Grant agent Gay Sheffield from Nome responded to report of a dead bowhead and a dead grey whale northeast of Shishmaref near Cape Espenburg.
A girl from Paso Robles, California, was bit by a sea lion in Pismo Beach on Friday near the pier. The animal that attacked likely had domoic acid poisoning, and will be treated at the Marine Mammal Center.
Some want to be able to kill them again off BC's coast. Part one of a Tyee special report.
According to preliminary data, more than seven thousand walruses were recorded, which is two times as many as last year. This was also when the largest walrus habitat in the history of Arctic exploration was found on the northernmost island of the Franz Josef Land archipelago, the Eva-Liv island.
This early in spring, the season usually only starts, but the weather patterns have been changing, and so has been the harvest time, Donovan said.
“Last year we got several reports from tourists and scientists that they saw around six walruses dead here on the west side of Svalbard. Unfortunately, we couldn’t sample them as the dead walruses drifted away by the time we got to the place. But it’s not normal to get so many reported dead walruses in such a small area," said Christian Lydersen, senior scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. Now samples (collected by a Station Manager in July 2023) have tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza.
It wasn’t clear what precisely had prompted Wally to venture so far from Arctic waters, though observers are seeing more Arctic species entering Irish waters in recent years and she suspected he came south to forage for food.
The peer-reviewed research published this week in the Public Library of Science suggests that 99% of the orcas studied had photographic evidence of skin lesions. Researchers evaluated photos from nearly 20,000 orca sightings from 2004 to 2016, finding that lesions — often gray patches and gray targets on the orcas' skin — generally became more prevalent over time.
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