Ringed seal. Ladoga ringed seal Why ringed seal
Ringed seal, or Akiba (Pusa hispida), is covered with coarse blackish-brown fur with numerous irregularly shaped white rings. The body length of an adult male is up to 1.8 m.
It is the only one of all seals that builds a nest for its young. In March or April, when the ice begins to break, the female makes a hole in a snowdrift with a tunnel leading to an air vent and water. Newborns (sometimes twins) are covered with snow-white soft wool (belka stage), which after a month is replaced by a darker one.
The ringed seal appears to be the farthest northerly of all mammals; she spends most of the year in ice-covered bays and fiords. In autumn, as the water freezes, the animal does not migrate south, but makes holes in the ice, to which it regularly swims up to breathe and rest. Sometimes this leads to a sad result, since a hunter with a harpoon or polar bear. Usually, the seal spends 8–9 minutes under water, but if necessary, it can stay there for up to 20 minutes. Ascending, she manages to stock up on air for the next dive in 45 seconds.
The ringed seal is distributed circumpolarly in the Arctic Ocean, reaching south to Labrador and the Bering Sea.
There are four subspecies of the ringed seal: Ringed seal (Phoca hispida hispida); Baltic ringed seal (Phoca hispida botnica); Ladoga seal (Phoca hispida ladogensis); Seal of Lake Saimaa in Finland (Phoca hispida saimensis)
Species: Pusa hispida Schreber = Ringed seal, ringed seal, akiba
Status: In Russia, the ringed seal is an object of fishing. It is not a CITES object. Only the Ladoga subspecies is listed in the Red Book of Russia (category 3).
Currently in Russia industrial production there is no ringed seal. Several hundred heads are harvested annually by the population of coastal areas for their own needs.
The heyday of industrial production of the species in our country falls on the 1950-60s. when annually it reached tens of thousands of individuals (for example, in 1962, 13,570 seals were caught in the Barents and White Seas alone).
Appearance, weight: An adult animal on average reaches 1.0-1.2 m in length and 50-80 kg in weight. A newborn cub is 0.6 m long and about 4 kg in weight. Newborn cubs have white juvenile fur, which after 4-6 weeks changes to gray with dark rings, for which the animal got its name.
Life cycle: The ringed seal is a typical pagophilic species, i.e. her life cycle closely related to the ice cover. Ringed seals become sexually mature at the age of 5-7 years. Mating occurs in January-March. Pregnancy lasts 11 months. In February-March, the female gives birth to one cub, which she feeds for 5-7 weeks. The molt takes place in the summer. Life expectancy - up to 40 years.
From the moment of formation of the ice cover, a pregnant female arranges a ancestral den in the ice. The lair is a shelter among the hummocks, connected to the water by a manhole in the ice. By the time of whelping, the lair is completely covered with snow and has no access to the surface. During the winter, the female maintains about a dozen such shelters under the snow for rest and breathing and gives birth to a calf in one of them. For 5-7 weeks, the cub is in the den and does not go into the water.
Distribution: The ringed seal is distributed in all Arctic seas, as well as in the Barents and Okhotsk. The Baltic Sea and Lake Ladoga are inhabited by independent subspecies (Baltic and Ladoga seal). The distribution of the species largely depends on the ice cover of the reservoirs on which these seals breed. It is believed that extended migrations are not typical for the species, and local movements depend on the availability of food and changes in ice conditions.
Population: Ringed seal is one of the most numerous kinds marine mammals. It is extremely difficult to determine the number of seals, as well as other marine mammals. All assessments that exist today are to a large extent expert in nature.
According to a rough expert estimate, the number of the species in the world is 1.2 million.
Diet: The basis of the diet of ringed seals are various types of fish, zooplankton. The predominance of one or another species in the diet depends on the season and the habitat of the ringed seal. In each specific habitat area, the diet of seals can be 10-15 various kinds, with an absolute predominance of 2-4 of them. The maximum body length of ringed seal victims does not exceed 20 cm. In the Arctic seas great importance has polar cod (Boreogadus saida).
Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) is one of the most abundant fish in the Arctic seas. The most important food source for more big fish, marine mammals and birds.
Threats: As with other marine mammals, ringed seals are currently greatest danger represents the pollution of the world's oceans. In addition, the premature destruction of the ice cover due to abnormally warm winter weather or icebreaking vessels can lead to the death of a large proportion of newborn pups. http://www.2mn.org/ru/mammals/species/ringed.htm#life
Author's workAuthor: Vasilyeva E. and Fedotova E., students of the 2nd grade of the GBOU Gymnasium No. 196
Head: Glikman Elena Vladimirovna
Review: Lyubov Anatolyevna Eremina, teacher of biology, chemistry and geography, MKOU "Selkovo basic comprehensive school"
Appearance
The Baltic ringed seal is a marine mammal that belongs to the genus of small seals. It is called differently ringed seal or akiba. Here is what is noted in Wiktionary about this seal: "In general, the ringed seal is much smaller harbor seal; but she has a thick layer of fat under her skin. "It is this layer that prevents the seal from freezing, so some subspecies of the seal dare to swim far into the Northern Arctic Ocean. The body color is dark gray with light streaks in the form of rings. Maybe that's why they call her a ringed seal? The front flippers are shorter than the back ones. Head with a short muzzle. The average weight of the animals is 80 kg, as in a tall adult male.
Spreading
An inhabitant of the arctic and subarctic waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It lives mainly in coastal shallow water areas. It also inhabits the Baltic Sea, about Lake Ladoga. In the northern seas of Russia, the seal is distributed from the Murmansk coast to the Bering Strait, including the White Sea, the waters of Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya, Novosibirsk Islands.
The Baltic ringed seal also lives in the Gulf of Finland and Riga.
Nutrition
In the Baltic Sea, seals mainly feed on sprat, Baltic herring, gobies, crustaceans, and rarely cod. During the day, the seal eats up to 8 kilograms of this food.
reproduction
Females give birth in the Baltic Sea - mainly in early March. Prior to that, she had been carrying her offspring for 11 months. The female brings one, occasionally two cubs, covered with thick and soft hair. The baby is creamy white in color, which is why it is called white pup. A newborn seal can independently go into the water and swim. Milk feeding of cubs lasts 3-4 weeks, after which they become independent. After 6-7 years, adult animals will be able to breed.
Security
In 1970, there were about 12.5 thousand Baltic ringed seals in the Gulf of Finland and Riga. Today, their numbers are decreasing. Previously, the number of these seals decreased due to the hunting of these marine animals. Now seals breed less and less often, because the waters of the bays where they live are polluted with industrial and agricultural waste.
in the waters former USSR since 1980, a ban on the extraction of the Baltic ringed seal has been introduced.
The image of the seal can be found on postage stamps and in art.
Gallery
Nerpa 1 001.jpg
Nerpa in the water
Nerpa-2-001.gif
Nerpa on dry land
Literature (sources)
- Airapetyants A.E., Verevkin M.V., Fokin I.M. Baltic ringed seal / Red Book of Nature of St. Petersburg. Rep. ed. G.A. Noskov. - St. Petersburg: ANO NPO "Professional", 2004. - 95-96 p.
- Atlas of marine mammals of the USSR. - City: "Food industry", 1980. - 39-40 p.
- Geptner V.G., Naumov N.P. Mammals of the Soviet Union. Volume 2, part 3. - City: Title, 1976. - 169-173 p.
- Ivanter E.V. Mammals. - Petrozavodsk: "Karelia", 1974. - 202 p.
The ringed seal, or as it is also called, the ringed seal, belongs to the species of real seals and lives in the Arctic, in the Arctic Ocean.
You can meet ringed seals in the Baltic, Barents and Bering Seas, as well as in some lakes, in particular Ladoga. The distribution area of the ringed seal is very wide. This animal is found off the coast of Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, in the White Sea and near the New Siberian Islands.
Ringed seals can be found on the West Coast of Greenland, northern Norway, Svalbard and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The habitat of this animal includes the island of Newfoundland, Hudson Bay, and St. Lawrence Bay. But the most interesting thing is that the ringed seal, which usually lives in cold waters, is also found in the Mediterranean on the Cote d'Azur.
Such a wide distribution indicates that the population of the ringed seal is quite large. According to experts, there are about 3 million individuals in the Arctic. In the warmer waters of the Baltic Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and Lake Ladoga, the population size approaches 4 million. A much smaller number of seals is found in the waters of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago - up to 1 million heads, and there are about 800 thousand of them in the Sea of Okhotsk.
The appearance of the ringed seal
The size of the ringed seal, which is found on the Arctic coast, is small - it grows up to 1.4 meters and weighs 70 kg.
It is believed that the ringed seal is one of the smallest seals. The growth of the animal stops at approximately 10 years. Females are usually smaller than males. The body of an animal that lives in water is round and thick, which makes it look short.
A small head almost immediately passes into the body, as the neck is very small and thick. Such a beast looks like an elongated ball rolling over ice.
The muzzle of the ringed seal has a flattened shape, and light rings run along the entire dark, almost black body of the animal. This feature of the color of short and hard wool gave the name to the species. The belly of the seal is white, however, sometimes there are individuals with a yellowish belly. There are no peculiar rings in the color of the peritoneum and flippers.
The ringed seal has good eyesight, excellent hearing and sense of smell. Thanks to a thick fatty layer, the animal is adapted to a constant stay in cold water.
Behavior and nutrition of the ringed seal
Ringed seal, or in other words - akiba, loves to live where drifting ice floats in large numbers. Therefore, such places where they are not, the animal bypasses. This behavior is explained by the fact that for reproduction and rearing of offspring, strong ice floes with holes (holes) in them and air ducts are needed through which the animal in the water can breathe.
The ringed seal is a predator. Seals feed on two groups of animals - fish and crustaceans. In the Kara and Barents Seas, the seal hunts for, capelin and herring. Of the crustaceans, the seal loves black-eyed and amphipods. In the warmer, Baltic Sea, the diet of ringed seals consists of sprat, herring, gobies and cod.
Reproduction and lifespan
Ringed seal females bring their first offspring at the age of 6-7 years, and reach sexual maturity at 5-6 years. Seal cubs are born from mid-March to mid-April.
The duration of pregnancy is approximately 11 months, including the latent period (2-3 months). A female ringed seal has one cub in a litter, weighing up to 4 kg, and a little over half a meter long. The baby is born in a thick snow-white fur coat, which remains on it for 2 weeks. Then the color of the fur changes to a darker one, and after about 1.5 months, the seal cub looks the same as adults.
young male
Ringed seal, Baltic subspecies ( Phoca hispida botnica) and the Ladoga subspecies ( Phoca hispida ladogensis) are listed in the Red Book of Russia
Habitat
Ringed seal, or Akiba ( Phoca hispida) - a species of true seals, the most common in the Arctic: according to the most conservative estimates, there are about 4 million ringed seals in the world. This seal got its name due to the pattern on the coat, which consists of a large number of light rings on a dark background. Akiba is widespread in the seas of the Arctic Ocean from the Barents and White in the west to the Bering Sea in the east, it also lives in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Baltic, the Tatar Strait, the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, and sometimes rises along the Neva to St. Petersburg. The seal lives both in the coastal zone and in the open ocean, but more often it keeps in bays, straits and estuaries. This species does not make large regular migrations. In winter, the seal lives on the ice.
Appearance and nutrition
Seal- one of the smallest seals: body length of adults reaches 1.5 m, weight 40-80 kg; Baltic specimens are even larger - 140 cm and 100 kg. Males are usually somewhat larger than females. The body of the seal is short and thick, the head is small, the muzzle is slightly flattened, and the neck is so short and thick that it seems as if it does not exist at all. Akiba has excellent eyesight, hearing and sense of smell, which help the animal find food for itself and hide from predators in time. The seals feed on crustaceans, molluscs and fish (spiny goby, Greenland goby, pike, navaga, salmon, salmon).
Lifestyle
ringed seals never form colonies. Most often they stay alone, although sometimes they gather in small groups, which, however, are not very stable. All year round they spend at sea, for which their body is very well adapted.
Summer ringed seals They keep mainly in coastal waters and in some places form small haulouts on stones or pebble spits. In autumn, as the sea freezes, most of the animals leave the coastal zone deep into the sea and stay on drifting ice. A smaller part of the animals stays for the winter near the coast and keeps in bays and bays. In this case, even at the beginning of the freezing of the sea, the seal makes holes in the young ice - loopholes through which it emerges from the water. There are also smaller holes, used only to breathe through them. Often the hole in the hole is covered with a thick layer of snow, in which the seal makes a hole without an outlet to the outside. In such a convenient place, she rests, being invisible to enemies, mainly polar bears. The largest concentrations of seals are observed in the spring on drifting ice during puppies, molting and mating. This is especially characteristic of the seas of the Far East, where in one day of swimming in the ice you can observe many hundreds, and sometimes thousands of animals. More often, seals lie in groups of 10-20 heads, but there are clusters of a hundred or more animals.
reproduction
In April-May ringed seals the mating period begins, their pregnancy lasts 11 months, including a three-month latent stage. In March-April of the following year, females give birth to one large cub, whose body length reaches 50-60 cm and weighs about 4 kg. All of it is covered with beautiful white thick fur, which lasts only a month and a half, giving way to ordinary gray wool, through which you can see the rings characteristic of the species. The future mother carefully prepares for the birth of the baby - she builds herself a reliable shelter among the snow hummocks, the entrance to which is under water, so that the newborn becomes inaccessible to predators. For about two months, the baby lives in his house, eating mother's milk. At the same time, the female goes hunting every day. Females reach puberty at the age of four years, males - at 5-7 years. The life expectancy of ringed seals is about 40 years.
Subspecies
- Baltic ringed seal ( Phoca hispida botnica)
- White Sea ringed seal ( Phoca hispida hispida)
- Ladoga ringed seal ( Phoca hispida ladogensis)
- Okhotsk, or Far Eastern ringed seal ( Phoca hispida ochotensis)
- Saimaa ringed seal ( Phoca hispida saimensis)
ringed seal (other names - akiba, ringed seal) - an animal from the order of pinnipeds that lives in the Arctic. It is a close relative of the harbor seal. There are 4 subspecies ringed seal : White Sea, Baltic, Ladoga and Saimaa. Two of them (Baltic and Ladoga) are listed in the Red Book of Russia.
The appearance of the ringed seal
The ringed seal is quite small, its body length rarely reaches 1.5 meters, and its weight is more than 100 kg. Males are slightly larger than females. The body is short and dense, thickened.
The head is small, the neck is short. There is no long hair, there is only a short and coarse hairline, streamlined and smooth when wet. The coloring is very unusual and peculiar. The body is colored dark gray, sometimes almost black, on which light spots and rings are clearly distinguished, scattered throughout the body, with the exception of flippers and belly. Thanks to this coloring, the animal got its name.
The seal has well-developed sense organs: it has excellent vision, smell and hearing.
Ringed seal habitats
The territory of distribution of the ringed seal differs depending on its subspecies.
So the White Sea subspecies lives in the coastal zones of the seas of the Arctic Ocean, being one of the most common species of pinnipeds in these latitudes.
The Baltic subspecies is distributed in the Baltic Sea on the coasts of Estonia, Russia, Sweden and Finland. Very rare in Germany.
The habitat of the Ladoga subspecies is the water area of Lake Ladoga with the sources of the Neva River. Periodically moves from the lake to the Gulf of Finland.
The Saimaa subspecies is distributed on Lake Saimaa in Finland and is the only endemic mammal in this country.
ringed seals lead a solitary life and rarely come together in groups. This usually happens in the summer, when 30-50 individuals gather in the coastal zone and arrange rookeries. Closer to winter, seals go one by one on drifting ice floes away from the coast.
The ringed seal is an excellent swimmer and diver. She can hold her breath for 15-20 minutes, diving to a depth of 50 meters.
This animal feeds on fish: herring, saffron cod, capelin, polar cod, etc. The seal does not disdain crustaceans, invertebrates and zooplankton. It is quite easy for her to find food, and the question of how and where to get food never rises too sharply.
The seals spend most of their time underwater, swimming under ice floes. To get to the surface, they arrange "holes" - holes through which you can climb onto the ice floe. If the seal only needs to breathe, then they create "air" - small holes in the ice.
The number of ringed seals varies depending on the subspecies. The White Sea subspecies is very numerous, which is not endangered.
The Baltic subspecies tends to decrease, the number of individuals currently does not reach 50 thousand individuals.
The number of individuals of the Ladoga subspecies is about 20 thousand, and the Saimaa subspecies is no more than 100.
The main negative factor affecting the number of individuals of the ringed seal:
- pollution of the lakes and seas in which they live
- sewage discharges and production waste
- uncontrolled fishing and vigorous economic activity throughout the distribution area.
Natural enemies that affect the number of individuals of the ringed seal are polar bears, arctic foxes, killer whales and walruses.
Ringed seal breeding
The active breeding season of ringed seals, like many other animals, begins in the spring. Pregnancy lasts 11 months, 3 of which are latent. The expectant mother prepares a safe shelter for herself and her baby by building a shelter out of snow hummocks. It necessarily has a hole in the ice through which you can get into the water and swim to the surface.
In March-April, the female gives birth to one cub weighing about 5 kg. Within a month, it is covered with beautiful snow-white fur, which gradually changes to dark gray wool. Milk feeding lasts 2-3 months.
Seals reach sexual maturity at the age of 5-7 years. The life expectancy of these animals is 30-35 years.
Protection of the ringed seal
ringed seal listed in the International Red Book with the status of "least concern". On the territory of Russia, the Baltic and Ladoga subspecies are under protection. Finland has developed a special program for the protection of the Saimaa subspecies ringed seal. In general, there is a need to create reserves and constantly monitor the number of these animals.
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