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How seals relate

Biologist Bradley Swanson has helped develop a new approach to solving the mystery of how seals interrelate on Alaska’s North Shore.

Using the data captured through analyzing the DNA in skin cells shed by ringed seals, Swanson and other researchers believe the ringed seals live and breed within smaller groups than previously believed. Many researchers had thought the ringed seal population was a homogenous group that stretched across the North Shore, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

Swanson presented his findings during an international symposium on arctic wildlife last fall in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Swanson says the research, which is being done jointly with the Juneau-based University of Alaska Southeast, suggests that development on the North Shore may cause more damage to ringed seals than once thought because they may live in smaller groups.

“You might wipe them out from a local area, and they won’t come back,” Swanson says.

For several years, researchers at the Alaskan university had tracked the movement of the seals by attaching tags to their fins that send signals to an orbiting satellite. Swanson and others were searching for ways to more easily track larger numbers of seals, leading them to develop the method of collecting the seals’ skin cells about two years ago.
The seals shed the skin flakes as they molt in the snow, and researchers use Labrador retrievers to detect the odor of seals and find the animals’ breathing holes where skin flakes can be found.
Swanson performs DNA analysis of the skin flakes at the Applied Technology in Conservation Genetics Laboratory at CMU. With enough specimens, Swanson can present a picture of how a single group of seals moves across the North Shore.

He stresses the findings are preliminary. CMU and the University of Alaska Southeast will continue the research with a recent $212,000 grant from the North Pacific Research Board, a federally created agency designed to develop a comprehensive program to enhance understanding of the North Pacific, Bering Sea, and Arctic Ocean ecosystems and fisheries.

Swanson says that work will include analyzing 2,500 collected seal teeth dating from the 1970s to give researchers a more long-term picture of how seal groups have moved across the North Shore. Also, Stephanie Sell, a CMU graduate student from Anchorage, will help the Alaskan university place satellite tags on ringed seals this spring. •

Bradley Swanson

Stephanie Sell