7,000 seals found dead at a breeding colony in Central Namibia

An approximated 7,000 Cape fur seals have been found dead at a breeding colony in central Namibia.

Conservationist Naude Dreyer of the charity Ocean Conservation Namibia (OCN) started seeing lifeless seals on the sandy beaches of Pelican Point colony – a traveller stop recognised for its colony of seals and schools of dolphins – near Walvis Bay city in September.

In the first two weeks of October, he discovered huge numbers of seal foetuses at the community.

Tess Gridley from the Namibian Dolphin Project determined that between 5,000 and 7,000 female seals had miscarried blooming with more still being found. Last week, there was an inflorescence in the number of dead adult females, Dreyer announced.

“What we have been witnessing is less freshly lifeless seal pups and a lot of stagnant female adults,” he stated.

Fur seals frequently give birth between mid-November and mid-December.

The cause of the mass die-off is yet to be established, but scientists suspect anything from pollutants or bacterial infection to malnutrition.

Some of the dead female seals found were “thin-looking, starved, with very little fat stores”, announced Gridley.

In 1994, some 10,000 seals killed, and 15,000 foetuses were aborted in a mass die-off that was associated to deprivation presumed to have emerged from a deficiency of fish as well as from a bacterial disease at the different breeding colony, the Cape Cross, around 116km (72 miles) north of the central tourist town Swakopmund.

Annely Haiphene, managing director in the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, told AFP news agency she assumed the seals died from “lack of food” but will wait for the outcome of the tests.