Thanks very much to everyone who contributed to our year end campaign. Here’s a glimpse into some of the activities you’ve helped to make possible and how your support directly makes an impact every day.

An Unusual Response

In Maine, gray seals gather on a remote island over 20 miles off the coast to give birth to their pups in the cold months of December and January. During this time, a live, public nature camera on the island shares the intense, rugged life of gray seal pupping and mating season. In January, our response team was alerted to a troubling situation observed by the camera operators; a female who had recently given birth with a deeply embedded material entangled around her neck.

Above, the nursing gray seal has the classic entanglement indentation around her neck, indicating that the constricting material is cutting so deeply into her neck that it is no longer visible. All you can see now are the edges of the wound.

While a situation like this is one we would want to help right away, there were many factors that made this case complicated and in need of careful planning. Including:

• a 300 pound seal protective of her pup

• hundreds of other fragile mom and pup pairs close by who could abandon their pups if too stressed by our presence

• territorial male gray seals weighing up to 1,000 pounds during mating season

• her location on a remote island without a dock to unload gear or easily access

• January-a month characterized by very rough marine weather and subfreezing air temperatures.

MMoME immediately started the process of coordinating this complex response, bringing in expert team members from fellow stranding response organizations and Maine Marine Patrol to join us. After weeks of planning, acquiring the necessary permits, and multiple delays due to weather, our team reached the island and located the entangled seal. We were able to more confidently determine that she was entangled in a plastic packing band, much like those we’re familiar with from delivered packages-something we all see in our every day lives. Unfortunately, despite the exhaustive planning, expertise, time, and funds dedicated to this response, the entangled seal retreated to the water before we could attempt a disentanglement. Thankfully, the timing of this response coincided with when she would be naturally weaning her pup (gray seals nurse for about three weeks), ensuring the pup was not impacted.

While we are deeply disappointed that this seal remains entangled, the experience and knowledge gained serves as a critical stepping stone in a growing initiative MMoME has been working towards-helping the many seals in Maine we have documented with painful, often fatal, entanglements in marine debris, just like this female. Everyone’s wish and goal is to get out there and do something about this significant and terrible problem, but frustratingly, this is also an extremely complicated problem that takes time to safely and successfully address. Regardless of last month’s outcome, we are dedicated to furthering this effort for the welfare of these animals.

We share this story with you, our marine mammal community, so you know cases like this exist, and to share that your support helps ensure they are not only documented, but also that there are experts dedicated to navigating the challenges to provide help. We also share this story to highlight actions we can all take to reduce the potential for entanglement by properly disposing of our trash, reducing the amount of plastic we consume, picking up trash we find outside, and cutting loops of material!

HPAI Update

The bird flu, also known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), has been in the news a lot lately. Birds are not the only wild species impacted by HPAI. You might remember in 2022 we responded to HPAI in seals for the first time documented in the United States and that an Unusual Mortality Event was declared as a result. Since that time we have continued to monitor the spread of the virus, including outbreaks with devastating impacts on marine mammals elsewhere in the world, and its potential implications for marine mammals, by collecting samples from live and deceased strandings that we respond to and collaborating with the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University to test these samples.

To date we have not had additional positive cases, though a recent uptick in bird deaths in Maine and throughout the northeast, along with increasing bird migration across our region as spring approaches, mean we need to remain vigilant to monitor the spread of this virus.

While transmission risk to humans is low at this point, in order to mitigate the spread of the virus it’s important to minimize contact with potentially infec

ted wildlife. What can you do to help? One of the most important actions you can take is to keep dogs leashed and a distance away from wildlife, both live and dead, avoiding direct contact with areas where wild birds congregate, and reporting all marine mammal strandings to your local stranding network-in Maine, call 1-800-532-9551.

Marine mammals are well known to be prime sentinels of ocean health. This makes them excellent indicators of ecological changes thatcould impact human health, industries, and much more. The data that we collect while monitoring HPAI and other viruses, is critical to understand emerging threats to the marine ecosystem, and how to protect these species.

Rehab Center Greetings

Here is a look at some of our winter patients currently receiving care, and enjoying their snow, at our rehabilitation facility in Brunswick. Your support helps to make their care possible.

Pictured here is a gray seal pup found stranded and huddled in a thorn bush in Kennebunk earlier this month and an adult harp seal collected in Saco on President’s Day, which was the same day we collected an adult harp seal last year!

Stay Tuned

One of our recently released harp seal patients has been on the move (yes that dark part in the map is the edge of the continental shelf!). We’re going to share more about her important story in an upcoming Friday Night Video. Sign up for our email updates here and stay tuned for more!