March 2007 HARBOR SEAL (Phoca vitulina): Western North Atlantic Stock

• Main Authors: Stock Definition, Geographic Range
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Greenland; Mansfield; Payne; harbor seal; North Atlantic; Phoca vitulina
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.174.5822; http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/tm/tm201/pdfs/114-120.pdf

The harbor seal is found in all nearshore waters of the Atlantic Ocean and adjoining seas above about 30 º N (Katona et al. 1993). In the western North Atlantic, they are distributed from the eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland south to southern New England and New York, and occasionally to the Carolinas (Mansfield 1967; Boulva and McLaren 1979; Katona et al. 1993; Gilbert and Guldager 1998; Baird 2001). Stanley et al. (1996) examined worldwide patterns in harbor seal mitochondrial DNA, which indicate that western and eastern North Atlantic harbor seal populations are highly differentiated. Further, they suggested that harbor seal females are only regionally philopatric, thus population or management units are on the scale of a few hundred kilometers. Although the stock structure of the western North Atlantic population is unknown, it is thought that harbor seals found along the eastern U.S. and Canadian coasts represent one population (Temte et al. 1991). In U.S. waters, breeding and pupping normally occur in waters north of the New Hampshire/Maine border, although breeding occurred as far south as Cape Cod in the early part of the twentieth century (Temte et al. 1991; Katona et al. 1993). Harbor seals are year-round inhabitants of the coastal waters of eastern Canada and Maine (Katona et al. 1993), and occur seasonally along the southern New England and New York coasts from September through late May (Schneider and Payne 1983). In recent years, their seasonal interval along the southern New England to New Jersey