Demand for cull of seals 'puts species at risk'

There is no scientific justification for culling the seal population of Britain despite intensive lobbying by the fishing industry to control numbers, the conference was told.

Professor Ian Boyd, a marine biologist at the Sea Mammal Research Unit in the University of St Andrews, said research was incomplete but early results indicated that culling might send British seal numbers into irreversible decline. "The research definitely suggests that we should not be culling seals. There's too much uncertainty in the population dynamics of seals. This uncertainty surrounds unpredictable, quite large-scale events that can happen to seal populations from time to time," he said.

In the late 1980s, when seals in Europe suffered an attack of distemper virus, some of the largest colonies were devastated. One population of harbour seals living in the Wash area of the North Sea coast was cut by half, Professor Boyd said.

"These sorts of events are unpredictable. We cannot predict what the long-term effects of a cull would be so there are dangers associated with culling these animals.Culling seals is not something we should be doing for good biological reasons, quite apart from the political reasons. We don't know enough about the population dynamics of seal populations in the UK at the moment."

The fishing and salmon- farming industry have lobbied for culling on the grounds that Britain has a booming population and seals eat vast quantities of cod and other commercially important fish. But Professor Boyd said there was no simple relationship between culling and a rise in fish stocks.

"If you take a seal out of the system it does not mean the fish that it eats become available to fishermen. Seals might not be competing directly with fishermen for fish. In my personal view I don't think we will ever cull seals on a large scale in the UK," he said.

Scientists from the Sea Mammal Research Unit are to investigate the diet of seals using small video cameras glued to the creatures' heads. A pilot project in the Antarctic has already provideda greater insight into how seals feed on the krill of the southern oceans.

"I hope the camera work will help to develop a better overall understanding of what affects the dynamics of these populations, and by understanding the dynamics better we can then predict with greater certainty what the effects of a cull might be on those populations," Professor Boyd said.