Endangered
Hooded seal
Cystophora cristata
The hooded seal or bladdernose seal is a large phocid found only in the central and western North Atlantic, ranging from Svalbard in the east to the Gulf of St.
Appearance
The seals are typically silver-grey or white in color, with black spots that vary in size covering most of the body. Hooded seal pups are known as "blue-backs" because their coats are blue-grey on the back with whitish bellies.
Range and habitat
Hooded seals live primarily on drifting pack ice and in deep water in the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic. Males appear to be localized around areas of complex seabed, such as Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and the Flemish cap, while females concentrate their habitat efforts primarily on shelf areas, such as the Labrador Shelf. Hooded seals are known to be a highly migratory species that often wander long distances, as far west as Alaska and as far south as the Canary Islands and Guadeloupe.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The diet of the hooded seal is composed primarily of various amphipods (crustaceans), euphausiids (krill), and fish, among them Atlantic argentine, capelin, Greenland halibut, flounder, polar cod, herring, and redfish. Their diet is considered to be rich in lipids and fatty acids.
Hooded seals tend to feed in relatively deep waters ranging from 100–600 m (330–1,970 ft), and dive from 5 to 25 minute durations. It is known that the hooded seal is generally a solitary species, except during breeding and molting seasons. The seals mass annually near the Denmark strait around July, at the time of their molting periods, to mate.
In crisis
More recently, the main threats are hunting, among them subsistence hunting, and bycatch. Seal strandings are not considered a large threat to hooded seal populations but are highly researched. Overall, northwest Atlantic hooded seal populations are stable or increasing whereas the northeast Atlantic populations have declined by 85–90% within the last 60 years.
Conservation practices, brought about by international cooperation and the formation of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) led to hooded seal population increases. It is now required to hold a license to hunt hooded seals in international waters and each license is set a quota.
Hooded seal is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Hooded seal, Wikidata item Q214287. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
