from Giles Whittell in Moscow - The
Times UK
 Imprisoned
by ice and Arctic winds, more than half a generation of baby seals
in the Russian Far North will die of starvation over the next
two months because of a trick of evolution that was meant to save
them, scientists say.
A Russian
government research institute has claimed that between 250,000
and 300,000 Greenland seal pups, most of them less than two months
old, are doomed to die because ice floes that would normally have
carried them to their spring feeding grounds are only now beginning
to move and their mothers have already left them.
The forecast
could be used to justify the large-scale culling of seal pups,
which are blamed by the Russian and Norwegian Governments for
damaging fish stocks.
The loss of
life will be the worst sustained in such an environmental accident
by Russia’s Greenland seals, also known as harp seals, since
1966, when an estimated 60 per cent of the total population died.
“There
is almost nothing people can do to help,” Vladimir Potyelov,
of the Russian Polar Research Institute for Fisheries and Oceanography,
said. “At most, 5,000 animals can be saved.”
Mr Potyelov
returned last week from an aerial survey of the White Sea northwest
of Archangel, which he said had shown thousands of newborn seal
litters stranded on the shores of the Kandalakshskaya and Dvinskaya
Gulfs with no hope of reaching food.
In a normal
year the baby seals would spend six weeks drifting northeast on
floating pack ice out of the White Sea, starting in early March.
Driven by the freshwater outflow of three big rivers — the
Onega, the Dvina and the Mezen — the ice would take them
into the southern Barents Sea, where they would feed on spawning
capelin, a member of the salmon family.
During the
annual migration the pups are usually fed by their mothers until
their pelts change from white to grey, a signal that they are
strong enough to swim and to feed themselves. This year abnormal
northerly winds had created an icy bottleneck at the northern
entrance to the White Sea, Mr Potyelov said.
Wildlife groups
were sceptical. “It’s very suspicious that this is coming
from the fisheries institute,” Peter Prokosh, of the World
Wide Fund for Nature, said. “Governments routinely say there
are too many seals eating too many fish.”
Up to 20,000
Greenland seals born in the White Sea are expected to be slaughtered
this year with the approval of the Russian Government.
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