They may look cuddly, but they want to eat your brains.
Seals found guilty of brutal porpoise attacksIn the chilly waters of the North Sea, off the Dutch and Belgian coasts, a spate of vicious attacks has been baffling biologists. The mutilated bodies of harbour porpoises have washed ashore, their throats ripped out and skin covered in puncture wounds. Now DNA evidence has nailed the culprit – not sharks, propellers or fishing nets, as previously suspected, but grey seals.
"It's hard to believe that a nice cuddly looking animal could do this," says Mardik Leopold of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, who led the work. "We were very skeptical ourselves at first. We thought it was suction dredgers, but we've been on these ships and observed and it's impossible. DNA is really the smoking gun."
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"I believe the phenomenon is increasing," Haelters says. "I have been collecting porpoises from Belgian beaches since 1995 [and] I am pretty sure we had no cases in Belgium prior to 2011. We now have cases every year."
Haelters and Leopold agree that an increase in fishing that accidentally traps porpoises in its nets is one possible explanation. Grey seals are known to scavenge nets, and may have been introduced to fat-rich porpoise that way. It may have just been a lucky bite. "It is not unknown for pinnipeds to attack other marine mammals, so it could be that they developed a 'taste' for the porpoises," says Tom Jefferson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.
While human swimmers need not panic, Leopold and Haelters say they should at least be aware of grey seal's newfound taste for mammal. There's no reason to think seals wouldn't attack humans. "This is, at least for Belgium and the Netherlands, our largest predator, and the images illustrating what they can do with a porpoise speak for themselves," Haelters says.
Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West.
Topic: Beware of the seals.