Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin (ISSN 0178 – 6288) . Number 133, January 2016, pp. 1-29. | Page 6

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destruction of animals' habitat. Because of these seals' shy nature and sensitivity
to human disturbance, they have slowly adapted to try to avoid contact with
humans completely within the last century, and, perhaps, even earlier. The
coastal caves are, however, dangerous for newborns, and are causes of major
mortality among pups (Wikipedia).

Status
This earless seal's former range extended throughout the Northwest Atlantic
Africa, Mediterranean and Black Sea, coastlines, including all offshore islands of
the Mediterranean, and into the Atlantic and its islands: Canary, Madeira, Ilhas
Desertas, Porto Santo... as far west as the Azores. Vagrants could be found as far
south as Gambia and the Cape Verde islands, and as far north as continental
Portugal and Atlantic France (Wikipedia).
Several causes have provoked a dramatic population decrease over time: on one
hand, commercial hunting (especially during the Roman Empire and Middle
Ages) and, during the 20th century, eradication by fishermen, who used to
consider it a pest due to the damage the seal causes to fishing nets when it preys
on fish caught in them; and, on the other hand, coastal urbanization and
pollution (Wikipedia).
The species has gone extinct in the Sea of Marmara due to pollution and heavy
ship traffic from the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. In addition, the last report of
a seal in the Black Sea dates to the late 1990s (Wikipedia).
Nowadays, its entire population is estimated to be less than 600 individuals
scattered throughout a wide distribution range, which qualifies this species as
Critically Endangered. Its current very sparse population is one more serious
threat to the species, as it only has two key sites that can be deemed viable. One
is the Aegean Sea (250–300 in Greece and some 100 in Turkey) and the other is
the Western Saharan portion of Cabo Blanco (around 200 individuals which may
support the small, but growing, nucleus in the Desertas Islands – approximately
20 individuals). There may be some individuals using coastal areas among other
parts of Western Sahara, such as in Cintra Bay (Wikipedia).
These two key sites are virtually in the extreme opposites of the species'
distribution range, which makes natural population interchange between them
impossible. All the other remaining subpopulations are composed of less than 50
mature individuals, many of them being only loose groups of extremely reduced
size – often less than five individuals (Wikipedia).
These other remaining populations are in Madeira and the Desertas Islands (both
in the Atlantic Ocean) with a total of 30 to 35 individuals, and southwestern
Turkey and the Ionian Sea (both in the eastern Mediterranean). The species status
is virtually moribund in the western Mediterranean, which still holds tiny
Moroccan and Algerian populations, associated with rare sightings of vagrants
Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin – Number 133 – January 2016