Ice Seal Tracking Maps Archive

09/256/2016 – 10/277/2016

Requested Tracking Map
We are pleased to announce that we tagged two young bearded seals near Koyuk on 20 September. The bearded seals were captured, tagged, and released by Merlin Henry, a trained hunter-tagger from Koyuk, Merlin's grandson Jeremiah Henry, Mark Nelson (ADF&G), and Justin Crawford (ADF&G). These were the eighth and ninth bearded seals captured and tagged by Merlin during the three years he has tagging seals.

During the last 21 days we have received locations for 2 bearded seals, 3 ringed seals, and 7 spotted seals. The two bearded seals recently tagged near Koyuk quickly moved away from Koyuk; BS16-07-F (yellow line) is in southern Norton Sound and BS16-06-M (light green line) has moved into the Bering Sea. Two of the three ringed seals (RS16-01-M, gray line; and RS16-07-M, yellow line) are in the northern Chukchi Sea. One female spotted seal (SS16-06-F, brown line) has moved west of Point Hope. Two male spotted seals have moved south of Point Hope; SS16-07-M (aqua line) has moved from Barrow into Kotzebue Sound and SS16-08-M (green line) has moved south along the east coast of Chukotka, Russia, and has entered many of the coastal bays. The rest of the seals have generally moved southwest along the Chukchi Sea coast with some traveling through Peard Bay and lagoons near Icy Cape. No clear satellite images were available from the NASA Rapid Response Network because of thick cloud cover again. Therefore, sea ice data are courtesy of the University of Bremen, Germany, and dated 3 October (http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/).

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