Jul 17, 2025
Stupid seal rolls around like a stupid thing and does stupid stuff
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Stupid seal rolls around like a stupid thing and does stupid stuff
Baikal Seal 🦭
Have you seen the Baikal seal (Pusa sibirica)?
I have now
Yes, in photos/videos
Yes, irl
I'm not sure
This is the smallest species of true seal, and the only seal species which inhabits exclusively freshwater.
Elephant seal taxidermy in National Museum of Nature and Science (Tokyo) X
Uncharismatic Fact of the Day
Lake Baikal seals dive extremely deep to find food, reaching depths of over 400m (1300 ft). To give themselves a boost of oxygen and keep themselves warm, they have an extra 2 litres (0.5 gal) of blood circulating through their bodies!
(Image: A group of lounging Baikal seals (Pusa sibirica) by Sergio Tittarini)
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Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina)
Endangered Pinnipeds, part 3
Caspian seal, Pusa caspica
The last of the three earless, or “true seals” in this series, the Caspian seal is listed as endangered since 2008, before that it was “vulnerable” since 1994.
As it name reveals, it lives in the Caspian sea, in the southwest of Asia, where the coastlines belong to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan.
They are related to the Baikal seal which lives in Lake Baikal in central Russia, and both are believed to descend from ringed seals who made it south into the Caspian and Baikal about two million years ago.
They are one of the smallest species of seals at about the weight of a man, and less than 1.4 meters in length. And, strange for a mammal, they can keep growing slowly for up to four decades.
Photo: Pavel Erokhin
Like many other earless seals, they give birth to the familiar white, 5 kg pups on ice sheets in the north during winter.
Historically, the population is thought to have numbered roughly one million seals. Today, they have been reduced to only 10% of that, numbering under 100 000 animals.
Commercial hunts of the species began in the late 1700s, with kills averaging around 150 000 (and upwards of 300 000) per year in the 1800s. This carried on into the 1900s, when they were still taking up to 227 000 seals in one year in the 1930s. During this, the numbers fell, but the seals kept being killed on an industrial level until 1996, and by that time only about 14 000 seals were taken annually.
This stop in 1996 was only temporary however, and the Caspian seal is still being killed, in both commercial and “scientific” hunting in Russia, with dozens or hundreds of animals being taken annually. In the 2003-2004 season, 4600 seals were taken.
This hunt takes place under a quota of 18 000 animals, divided among the countries sharing the Caspian sea, but obviously never comes close to reaching it.
They are hunted for their skins to be used as clothing, and the blubber as medicine, fish bait, and even cattle feed in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
While they are still being hunted commercially (at, very roughly, 0.1% of the population being taken annually, if we average it at ~100 animals killed per year), new threats are rising for the species.
They are being caught as bycatch in sturgeon fisheries among others. In the 2008-2009 season, at least 1200 seals were killed as bycatch, over 90% of them in illegal sturgeon fisheries.
However, the study sampling reflected less than 10% of the overall poaching activity in the north Caspian, so the actual by-catch is likely to be substantially higher.
Iran is recorded as causing the accidental death of about 500 seals annually.
Among natural predators are wolves and eagles, and the species has experienced several recent mass mortality events.
In 1997 and 2000, several thousand seals died at once, believed to have been due to Canine Distemper Virus.
Other threats include an invasive jellyfish species causing a decline in fish stocks, contamination of lead, copper and zinc.
They are not officially known to be declining, but the IUCN states all of these threats combined are probably unsustainable, leading to a continued decline of the species.
IUCN
The endangered Hawaiian Monk Seal
Ka’ena point, HI
Niko is a disgusting rampant threat to humanity/j