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A nine month old
rare Hooded Seal was found washed up on a beach in Tenerife, in The
Canary Isles. It was hundreds of miles from its natural home which is in
the arctic. It was malnourished and had lost it’s fur. It has an
under-active thyroid and was cared for at a marine centre in Tenerife
for 4 months, but has now been brought to the seal sanctuary at Gweek
for a full veterinary assessment, where they have had a number of seals
suffering from the same condition. They will be doing blood tests and
monitoring his progress
over the next few months. He is keeping his distance from the other
seals at the sanctuary, and is a bit stunned by all the visitors, but is
doing really well and is feeding well. If he makes a full recovery he
will be taken back to Greenland and released back into the wild.
 Hooded
seals are a migratory species and sometimes visit European waters, but
it is unusual for one to go as far south as Tenerife. The males are
larger than females and have a much more pronounced proboscis hanging
over the mouth, as shown above. The proboscis can be inflated, as shown
at top left and the male can also turn a nasal lining or wall, inside
out, and inflate that as well, as illustrated at bottom left.
After researchers,
sponsored by Earthwatch, presented data proving the damage being done to
dolphin’s ecosystem in the western Mediterranean by the constant traffic
of oil tankers, container ships and other large cargo vessels, the
Spanish Merchant Navy and the IOM (International Maritime Organisation)
agree to move the shipping lanes 20 miles to the south.
In the Mediterranean
just east of Gibraltar there are several offshore marine areas, and
until now merchant ships have sailed straight through this supposedly
protected area in enormous numbers, disrupting the feeding grounds. The
decision to shift the shipping lanes offers a reprieve for the last
healthy population of Bottlenose Dolphins in the Mediterranean. Only two
professional researchers were involved in producing the data, but there
were over 500 volunteers in the project.
 It
just goes to show how you as divers could help researchers to achieve
fantastic results. The cetaceans were studied not only for their own
sake, but also because they are part of an ecosystem and are useful as
bio-indicators. Loggerhead Turtles have also been studied in the area,
and have also been in danger of disturbance. Several have been fitted
with radio transmitters and each time the turtles surfaced, sent signals
to a satellite, not only giving its position but also how deep it had
dived and also for how long it was submerged, and one turtle had been
submerged for over 110 hours without breathing.
Bottlenose Dolphins
were reported 11 times during April, but the pod of 8 with a juvenile,
that was the subject of most reports during March was not among those
reported. Most of the reports were of two middle-sized dolphins, one
with a notch out of its dorsal, playing around Penzance harbour mouth
and Fowey harbour mouth, travelling between the two in about 5 hours or
less. There was however a pod of 15 to 20 outside Penzance Harbour at
8.30 am, on the 21st, together with a pod of about the same number of
Common Dolphins, and as a dive boat left the harbour the Bottlenose
headed off east toward Marazion and the Common Dolphins left in the
direction of Newlyn.
There were 4 other
reports of Commons, and one report was of about 120 off Black Head. Of 6
reports of Harbour Porpoise, 4 were around West Penwith and 2 in the
Lizard area. Basking Sharks were reported 22 times, all on the south
coast from Wolf Rock to Picklecombe in Plymouth Sound. A single Grey
Seal was seen below the watch at Cape Cornwall on 4 different days.
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