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Heartwarming: seals are popular people.
You should keep away anyway - they defend their young
Photo: Joe Giddens/ dpa
The number of gray seals on Germany's coasts continues to rise.
This is good news because it allows conclusions to be drawn about how the marine ecosystem is doing as a whole: Reproduction is only possible because there is enough food and the animals are not disturbed too often.
Not disturbing them not only protects the gray seals on the coasts, but also humans.
As cute as they may seem, they are also the largest domestic predators and behave accordingly - gray seals can become quite defensive if you get too close, especially when they have pups.
So you shouldn't mess with them - Halichoerus grypus weighs up to 300 kilograms and grows up to two and a half meters long.
Each animal consumes around ten kilograms of fish a day, and they also hunt large prey: in addition to plaice and herring, mackerel, cod and salmon are also on their menu.
Occasionally, however, gray seals also attack porpoises, capture young seals or young animals of their own species – they are real predators.
On Heligoland's beaches, where most of the gray seals in the German North Sea are born, up to 1300 animals crowd at peak times, which Rebecca Ballstaedt from the Jordsand association describes as "highly aggressive" during this rearing period.
It is no coincidence that the largest native population can be found in the deep waters around Heligoland.
They disappeared from the Wadden Sea for a long time, not only because of nuisance and environmental pollution, but above all because of the intensive hunting that used to take place in this country: not because they wanted their fur or meat, but because fishermen feared the gray seals as competitors.
Despite the upward trend in recent years, the stocks of gray seals in German waters are still considered to be very endangered, and they are still considered very rare in the Wadden Sea.
There one tends to observe the comparatively much smaller seals (Phoca vitulina), which are about half as heavy as their cone-headed relatives.
Our domestic seals can be distinguished not only by their size and weight, but above all by their heads: Common seals have a round skull with a short snout and large-looking eyes.
They are also significantly more shy than gray seals.
They have a long, pointed, cone-shaped snout with an impressive set of teeth.
Babies in fur coats
The clear differences between the species also make it easier to count from the air.
The young animals in particular are easy to spot: their fur is conspicuously white in the first four weeks after birth.
As long as they are wearing this baby fur called »lanugo«, they cannot swim.
This first coat is long-haired and warming, but not as water-resistant as their later coat.
They are counted during the birth season from November to January during counting flights along the coasts, on Heligoland the offspring are counted with drones and from the beaches - as long as this is possible.
This year, counting from the beach is becoming more and more dangerous due to the increasing number of animals and is therefore no longer carried out every day, says Rebecca Ballstaedt from Verein Jordsand.
But although exact figures are not yet available, she believes:
This also applies to other regions.
In December, a total of 1036 gray seals, 393 of which were young, were registered in the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park during two counting flights.
"That was almost 40 fewer young animals than in the previous year, but 50 more adult animals were sighted," says Thea Hamm from the National Park Administration in Wilhelmshaven.
"I would consider that to be a relatively natural fluctuation." So the trend towards an ever larger population is continuing.
In addition, there are signs that the gray seals are retaking possession of areas from which they had long been displaced.
Conservationists are observing an increasing spread towards the Wadden Sea.
Most of the gray seals in the Lower Saxony National Park live on the Kachelotplate, a sandbank between the East Frisian islands of Juist and Borkum.
"The gray seals are slowly spreading eastward," says Thea Hamm.
In the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park, berths can be found in particular on the Jungnamensand and the Knobsands between Amrum and Sylt.
pat/dpa