These are sea dogs. I don’t think I need to write anymore about seals bar that, but I suppose I should really say a bit more about them. If you’ve spent a lot of time round the coast you have probably seen one of these bobbing up and down in the water at some point, whether up close or just a dark dot in the distance. This is because they are quite common around the UK and your much more likely to see a grey seal than any other marine mammal.

Grey Seals, although not a common occurrence in your local rockpool do haul out and like to sit on them! If this is the case, I suggest not going near them and leave them be. Firstly their shy and you’ll scare them, which is just not nice to do. But if that’s not enough to convince you to always observe seals quietly from a distance they can also reach over 2.5m long and have pointy teeth so why risk it! If you do however fancy getting up close and personal with seals, I highly reckoned becoming a British Diver Marine Mammal Medic, this way you can be properly trained and go help a seal when it is stranded. Heres the link to their website, I personally have trained with them and think its a great organisation.

Grey seals however don’t thrive on top of rock pools, they are blobs of blubber and not the most elegant of creatures on land as they wobble around. However put them in the water and they are majestic and fast swimmers. Seals in the water are curious, lovable and playful, they have captured the hearts of divers and there must be millions of videos on youtube of there interactions with humans. But they ant so amazing int he water for youtube hits, its because they have a taste for fish. To catch enough food to maintain all that snuggly fat that keeps them warm and help raise there young they need to be faster and turn better than their prey.  Grey seals are super unfussy eaters and will eat anything they can grab. They commonly like to stay around there local areas adapt to whatever fish you find, but they also can swim further a field if needs be.

They are on the IUCN red list of least concern, but there numbers still need to be monitored to make sure they don’t decline any further. Luckily they are not as severely effected by phocine distemper virus (PDV) which has massively dropped numbers of harbour seals (which are the super super cute looking seals… google it you’ll see what I mean).

This was a super short post, to be honest it’s because marine mammals are not my strong point as I’m more of a marine invertebrate enthusiast! But how could I resist drawing one of these precious sea dogs!! Share your ‘sealy’ stories with me at @marinemumbles on  twitter or comment on my Instagram.