A recently dead harbor seal at Letnikof Cove is missing its head. Well, most of it. The skull bones are still there and intact.
The phenomenon has appeared a few times throughout the state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s regional stranding coordinator said they have not quite figured out what is killing the seals, or getting to them after they’ve died.
“We have seen it before. I just don’t know what’s going on,” Mandy Keogh, said. “We often see scavengers go in for the eyes, or if there’s an opening or a hole somewhere. But we’ve seen it a few times where it’s a pretty clean skull but the rest of the body looks intact. Somebody, probably a scavenger, probably cleaned off the meat.”
She speculated that it might be one specific type of scavenger.
What happened post-mortem is only part of the mystery. The other part: what killed the animal in the first place?
“The rest of the body seems to be in good condition,” Keogh said of the Letnikof Cove seal after viewing photos of the carcass. Typically, this is when citizen science and reports can help. Keogh said anytime someone sees a marine mammal in distress, federal scientists encourage them to report it to a 24-hour hotline (877) 925-7773.
“Dead animal, live animal, entangled. Any marine mammal. Even if you’re not sure and you think there’s an animal in distress, a marine mammal, you call that hotline,” she said.
They’ll ask questions about location and the type of animal. Keogh said taking lots of pictures is helpful too — particularly with something that gives an idea of the scale of the animal.
“Dogs are good, people will send us that. They’ll say ‘my dog’s in the photo and it weighs 70 pounds.’ But it’s better if there’s something that we can use for length. So if it’s like a shoe or a glove or something you have with you and if we have an idea of what that length is, then we can extrapolate. Especially with harbor seals, the time of year and the length might give us an indication of whether it’s an adult, a juvenile, or this year’s pup,” she said.
The ideal is that NOAA could send a volunteer or response team out to handle each reported stranding or death.
“We often collect skin for genetics, which helps us understand the population and things like that, and then to take more measurements and look for other things that might give us an indication of cause of death.”
But some of the remote parts of Alaska, Haines included, no points of contact or a stranding organization that do that work, though occasionally state Fish and Game staff will step in and help.
Keogh said tracking these types of deaths helps scientists keep an eye out for unusual cases or an emerging threat. The response to a stranding often depends on whether there are volunteers in the region who can do a site visit. They collect samples, like viral swabs, to look for diseases, especially with fresh dead animals because that means they’re not too decomposed.
“It’s likely that the sample is of a quality that if we can, if it’s going to have a virus there, it’s detectable. We do collect often for avian influenza and other pathogens that might be of interest and look to see just for prevalence.”
The spread of avian influenza, or avian flu, is something many scientists track because as it spread around the world, questions have been raised about how it spreads to other animals and potentially humans.
A teen in British Columbia recently tested positive for an avian flu infection, which officials in Canada believe may be the first human case caught in the country.
So far, in Alaska, there are no known cases of humans catching the virus and very few cases of the flu spreading beyond birds.
Still, Keogh said it’s best to avoid handling a dead or dying marine mammal.
“Especially if it’s a dead animal. Something caused it to die and we don’t know at that time what that was,” she said.
And, Keogh said the more people who know, the more likely it is they could find an explanation for the unusual deaths like the seal at Letnikof Cove.
“It’s a mystery to me, but maybe there’s other folks or there is someone with traditional knowledge who has a better understanding of what’s going on, and I’m just not familiar with it,” he said.