A Pod of Nerpas, or Baikal Seals

Aug. 29, 2003 — The Ushkani Islands in Russia's Lake Baikal are the last preserve of a unique seal species, the nerpa, whose numbers have decreased dramatically over the last ten years as a result of poaching and pollution.

Over the ages, nerpas have developed amazing skills and can easily spend as long as 20 minutes underwater without breathing. If they feel particularly threatened they can remain below the surface for up to an hour, an astonishing achievement for mammals.

It may be however that the nerpas, who also spend a lot of time on dry land, do not feel threatened enough.

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"Nerpas are naive, gullible animals. They let men come very close," said Yevgeny Doynikov, a guard on the islands, which form part of Russia's Zabaykalsky National Park.

Doynikov and his colleagues are there to keep watch over the seals.

The islands are watched by rotating teams of three guards each who serve 10-day shifts. But because the guards have to live under tents while on duty, they only work there in the summer.

"It is impossible to live under a tent during the winter, it is much too cold," said Doynikov.

Unfortunately, winter just happens to be the time of year when the nerpas are most under threat.

It is between February and April that baby seals are born with their distinctive white fur, much prized by Russia's fashion industry. This makes them a tempting target for poachers, and it is at this time that they are most in need of protection.

The situation is made even worse for the nerpas by the fact that Lake Baikal is frozen during that time, making it easy for poachers to approach them, especially with no guards around. As a result, thousands of baby seals are killed each winter.

Around 10,000 nerpas, mostly young, die each year as a result of poaching or disease, the Russian office of environmentalist group Greenpeace says.

The average age of the nerpas taken as a whole has therefore increased, a fact that in turn has a negative impact on their ability to reproduce.

There were 104,000 nerpas in 1994, according to a census carried out by the Russian authorities.

When Greenpeace made a count of the seals in 2000, it found only 67,000 nerpas left.

In addition to poaching, pollution also takes a heavy toll on the seals, with a key culprit being a cellulose factory located at Baikalsk, on the lake's southern shore, said an official with Greenpeace Russia, Yevgeny Usov.

The plant emits effluent into the lake containing chlorine and dioxin, which "weaken the nerpas' immune system," as they eat polluted fish, Usov said.

Weakened by pollution, nerpas are then much more vulnerable to diseases, particularly the plague, and thousands died in epidemics in 1988 and 1997, he said.

The nerpa seal is one of more than 1,200 species that are unique to the lake — the world's largest single freshwater reserve — and its environs in Russia's remote Siberia region.