The Baikal seal – nerpa
Lake Baikal, magnificent and incredibly beautiful, is known throughout the world. More and more people are drawn here to enjoy its severe beauty and to experience for themselves the uniqueness and preciousness of this natural creation. Many visitors dream of catching a glimpse of its only mammal, the Baikal seal, locally called nerpa, an endemic that inhabits the expanses of this inland sea.
Origin
To this day it has not been established beyond doubt where the Baikal nerpa originated. Its nearest relatives live today in the cold North Sea and southern Caspian Sea. The first scientific description of nerpa was made during the 2nd Kamchatka or Great Northern Expedition led by Vitus Bering in the 18th century. One of the teams of this expedition worked at Baikal under the leadership of I.G.Gmelin who studied many aspects of the lake and its environs and described the seal.
Life
The Baikal nerpa (Phoca sibirica Gmelin 1788) — is a representative of the order of pinnepeds and the family of real (earless) seals. Nerpa spends most of its life in water, surfacing periodically to breathe. Thanks to the capacity of its blood to hold oxygen nerpa can remain under water for up to 45-60 minutes, although it usually stays there for 20-25 minutes, this is sufficient for it to catch food or escape danger. In water it can reach speeds of up to 25 kilometres an hour, but in normal circumstances it will swim at half the speed. In winter, when Baikal is frozen over, nerpa makes escape holes in the ice. This is an inborn instinct: in an experimental aquarium one and two month old nerpa pups made holes in foam plastic, scratching them out from beneath with their claws. They then poked their noses through to breathe, despite the fact that open water was not far away.
In mid-March nerpa gives birth to one or, very occasionally, two pups, in snow dens on the ice. The den has the form of a half oval, sometimes of considerable length (up to 5 metres) and width (up to 3 metres), with its own microclimate and escape holes. At first the pups are yellow-green in colour, but in two weeks turn white. This white fur is the pup's camouflage, enabling it, in the first weeks of life, while it is still feeding on its mother's milk, to be practically unnoticeable on the ice. At this time the pup remains in its den not entering the water. Nerpa feeds its young with milk twice as long as other seals. This results in quicker growth of the pups, and in general has a favourable influence on their whole process of development, and sexual maturation. By the time it switches on to independent feeding on fish its fur turns a silvery-grey. The investigations of Vladimir Dmitrievich Pastukhov have shown that the Baikal nerpa lives longer than other seals with a maximum age of 56 in females and 52 years in males. Its average weight is some 50 kilogrammes, but it can reach a maximum of 150 kg, with a length of 1.8 metres.
Nerpa mainly feeds on fish with no commercial value — gobies and, especially, the Baikal endemic, golomyanka. The famous Baikal omul falls prey to nerpa by chance, and makes up no more than 1-2% of its daily ration. Omul swims too quickly for the seal, and it is only those that are weakened that are eaten. Such selection only improves the quality of the omul population.
Hunting
Nerpa remains today the object of official and unofficial hunting. The main hunt takes place on the ice on sledges in the northern and middle basins of the lake. This begins around the 15th-25th of April when the seals' dens are broken by the warmer rays of the spring sun. Since 1970 two other forms of hunting have been introduced to Baikal — from boats with rifles and in autumn with nets. Both take place amongst ice fields, melting in the spring and forming in the autumn. Apart from those killed, many nerpa are wounded by bullets entering the body and not the head of the animal. In this case the nerpa usually manages to escape into the water, later to die of its wounds. The autumn hunt with nets is the most controversial, the victims mainly being pregnant females. Nerpa, caught in the netting, is usually brought out of the water dead from drowning... The present nerpa population has been estimated to be over 60,000 (according to data collected by Pastukhov and Evgeny Petrov). Hunting for nerpa, for the sake of its meat, fat and fur, has been carried on since ancient times. In the past, hunting went on at any time of the year and with no limitation. Till the end of the 19th century this could be tolerated, as a relatively small number were hunted commercially (up to 2,000 head), and even this unregulated hunting could not have a significant effect on the population. In the first years of the 20th century, because of more intensive development on the shores of Baikal and higher prices for nerpa products, hunting increased dramatically, reaching a yearly 6 thousand head in the 1930s. In 1935, as a result of the noticeable decline in nerpa numbers, only the more productive spring hunt was permitted, later a complete ban on its hunting was introduced in the southern half of the lake.
Until the beginning of the '70s hunting remained at a relatively low level, after which it began to rise in accordance with the plan of a scientific and economic experiment. Since 1977 six thousand head annually was allowed to be hunted officially. During the years of the experiment much attention was paid to the gathering of data on those animals that die of wounds, in fishing nets or at the hands of poachers, which were not taken into account in official statistics. This amounts to a considerable number — some 40% (3.6 thousand) in addition to the total number killed. Apart from this, around 7.6 thousand die yearly from natural causes. This means that more than 17 thousand head are lost to the population every year, which is almost a thousand more than are born.
Clearly, if we want to maintain the numbers at least at today's (decreased) level, the official limit to hunting should be reduced, or better still, in our opinion, banned altogether. All the more so as there appear to be reasonable grounds for this. We have found out that hunting for nerpa is not particularly lucrative for the hunters. State farms pay the hunter 3,000 roubles for every kilogramme of nerpa, and 50-80 thousand for a skin, which is not very popular because of the low quality of the fur of this animal. If the settlements around Baikal were to be supplied with adequate food and clothes, on the one hand, and on the other, tourists, wishing to see nerpa and bringing in an income, encouraged, it might well be possible to cut the hunting considerably if not to stop it altogether.
Nerpa project
In order to properly understand the problem and come to a well considered policy, the participants of the joint Russo-American project "Nerpa", Baikal Watch (Earth Island Institute) and Baikal Environmental Wave (financed by ISAR, the Institute of Soviet-American Relations) have undertaken a survey amongst local people, hunters, tourist firms, workers in the Protected territories around Baikal and scientists in order to assess the state of the nerpa population, the significance of the hunting, and what is necessary for it to be cut or stopped without causing conflict.
A very important part of the Nerpa project is its emphasis on information and education. For many years an attitude of consumption towards natural resources, nerpa amongst them, has been cultivated in people's minds. Now, in the absence of economic stability and a strong "green" movement in this country together with a widespread indifference towards anything that does not relate to material acquisition, the situation has worsened. Things are becoming more critical because of the absence of good working laws for nature protection and because those that exist are not being implemented. In addition, the increased possibilities for individual means of transport and growing wave of unorganised tourism has apparently been having a greater negative impact on the nerpa population over the last ten years than ever before.
Apart from disturbance factors, there is no sign of serious attempts being made to reduce industrial pollution around the lake. Within the project, scientists are investigating the levels of PCBs and dioxins in the seal. Pollutants weaken the animals ability to combat infection, and it is considered that these were the underlying cause for the mass deaths of nerpa in 1987-88. This in the world's deepest and purest lake!
Another stress factor for the nerpa population is the impact of global warming on the lake's ice conditions on which nerpa is closely dependent. Baikal is completely covered by ice for some 5 months of the year. The last twenty years has seen a tendency for this period to decrease, disturbing the complex biological cycle of development of the seal.
One of the aims of the project is to bring nerpa closer to the attention and hearts of the people of the Baikal region through video films, information, and exhibitions for adults and children. It should help all of us to understand better nerpa and its habitat, and develop in us the desire to care for both. In our industrial society, constant efforts are required to heighten people's perception of the natural world and to help us feel its wonder and fragility. We hope the project Nerpa will help us in this task.
Our partner and sponsor – Heinrich Boell Foundation
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