Phoca vitulina

Worldwide distribution; high abundance; precipitous decline in some areas, increases in other areas; suspected threats include food shortages resulting from local fisheries management practices, incidental and intentional take, disease, and entanglement in marine debris.

Temperate and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere. In the western North Atlantic, breeds at least from Cape Dorset on southwestern Baffin Island to Massachusetts; occurs along west coast of Greenland as far north as Disko Island and Avanersuaq, along the east coast to Ittoqqortormiit (Teilman and Dietz 1994); small numbers occur, mostly in river mouths, in parts of Hudson Strait, Ungava Bay, and Hudson Bay; small local populations inhabit some rivers and lakes of western Hudson Bay, moving as far as 240 km inland; small population occurs in the Lacs des Loups Marins (Seal Lakes) at the headwaters of the Nastapoka River in northern Quebec; large population breeds on Sable Island, 125 km off Nova Scotia; extirpated from Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario; sometimes ranges as far north as Ellesmere Island and as far south as Florida (Reeves et al. 1992, which see for distribution in eastern North Atlantic. In the eastern Pacific, breeds from Bahia San Quintin, Baja California, to Aleutian Islands, Pribilof Islands, and Nome, Alaska; in the western Pacific, Commander Islands south to Hokkaido, Japan (Reeves et al. 1992). In eastern North Atlantic, ranges from Murmansk to the outer Baltic and northern France, United Kingdom south to east Anglia, southern Ireland, Faroes, Spitsbergen, and Iceland (McLaren, in Macdonald 1985).

Hundreds of haulouts worldwide.

Pacific Ocean: Recent precipitous declines in the numbers of harbor seals observed at some traditional haulout areas indicate that a fairly high level of threat exists to the long-term viability of these populations. These declines have been most recently documented in the Bering Sea region, where comparable declines have also been documented for both fur seals and Steller's sea lions (Pitcher 1990, Fowler 1982, 1985, York and Kozloff 1987, Braham et al. 1980, Merrick et al. 1987, Calkins and Goodwin 1988). The causes for these declines are not fully known, but food shortages, disease, and entanglement in marine debris are primary factors currently being investigated (Pitcher 1990). Large numbers die from entanglement in gill nets in some areas (annually perhaps 5% of the population in California) (Reeves et al. 1992). In some areas, populations are reduced through government-sponsored culls (Norway) or commercial harvest (Iceland).