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Opinion What happens once the seals have fully recovered?

June 22, 2017 at 5:09 p.m. EDT
A colony of gray seals basks in the sun on a sand shelf in Chatham Harbor in Chatham, Mass. (Julia Cumes/Associated Press)

The June 15 news article "Scientists find booming recovery for gray seals" quoted Peter Krogh, my co-founder and co-director of the Nantucket, Mass.-based Seal Abatement Coalition. Nantucket is arguably ground zero for human-seal interaction resulting from the gray seal recovery.

The article asked the question “What happens after success?” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which administers the Marine Mammal Protection Act, is not celebrating the recovery of gray seals because the act protects seals and other marine mammals in perpetuity, regardless of stock status. The act does not address what happens when a marine mammal population recovers. Since the act provides neither for delisting nor managing recovered species, it would appear NOAA has little motivation to acknowledge that gray seals have demonstrably recovered, much less celebrate the gray seal “conservation success.”

Continued protection of gray seals means the indefinite proliferation of a large and dominant species with few natural predators — great white sharks are the only significant predator. That may affect the ecosystem, including prey species. There is considerable evidence that that’s already occurring.

The act is flawed in not providing for delisting recovered species (as does the Endangered Species Act) and in its focus on protecting particular species at the expense of a balanced ecosystem.

Peter Howell, Nantucket, Mass.