The Caspian seal is the only marine mammal in the Caspian Sea, and is found no where else in the world. At the start of the 20th century there were around 1 million Caspian seals. It is an iconic animal for the region, and is a key indicator for the health of the Caspian Sea, upon which the livelihoods of thousands of people depend.

Caspian seal is a medium-size animal with a total length between 140 and 175 cm and a weight of 50 to 95 kg; the males are larger than the females. The coloration depends upon age and varies among individuals. The newborn pups are white, tuning dark-grey by the age of two years.

Caspian seals follow a regular annual migration, usually spending the summer in the deeper and cooler southern parts of the sea and migrating to the shallow waters of the northeastern Caspian in the autumn. In early winter, when the waters freeze, female seals give birth in cavities which they excavate on the edge of the pack ice. A female produces one or two pups in February after about eleven months of gestation.

Owing to this migration pattern, it would appear that most seals found in Iranian waters in the winter are juveniles.

At the turn of the 19th century there were probably at least a million Caspian seals (or about 2.5 seals per square km of the sea). Today the numbers are approximately one tenth of that.

Historically, the principal reason for the decline was unsustainable commercial hunting throughout most of the 20th century. The Soviet Union - which included four of the five countries surrounding the Caspian (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan) - considered the Caspian seal to be a ‘harvested species’.

Hunting records show both pups and adult seals were killed in their tens of thousands every year on the ice-breeding grounds.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, active commercial seal hunting stopped in Kazakhstan, and the former sealing ships become rusting ghosts of their past. However, Russia still considers the seal to be a ‘harvested species’ and continues to operate a commercial hunt of a few thousand seals, mostly pups, every year. Small-scale, opportunistic hunting continues also in other parts of the Caspian.

Other important threats to the Caspian seal include deliberate killing by fishermen around fishing operations, and accidental drowning (by-catch) in fishing nets, disease, organ chlorine contamination of the food chain (particularly from DDT) can cause infertility in older females.

Fisheries by-catch is thought to kill about 500 seals a year along the Iranian coast every year, and probably accounts for many more deaths in other, less documented, parts of the Sea.

The first and foremost conservation measure to be taken is to stop all deliberate killing of Caspian seals.

Today the population has fallen by more than 90% and continues to decline. The Caspian Sea faces many human pressures and ecological changes, so urgent conservation measures are needed to prevent the disappearance of this key component of the Caspian ecosystem.

The Caspian seal project is a conservation initiative involving scientists from each of the five countries surrounding the Caspian (Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) together with specialists in seal science from the international community.

In Iran, the serious problem of seal deaths in fishing operations is already being tackled through the Darwin project. Some Iranian experts have organized workshops with local fishing associations and game wardens through which a new system has been put in place whereby fishermen who catch a seal in a net do not kill it as previously, but instead keep it in a holding tank until the Darwin team arrive to record data and take samples before releasing it unharmed.

Fishing by-catch is also likely to be a serious problem through much of the rest of the Caspian in both legal and illegal fishing operations. It is an important research priority to quantify the by-catch rates.

(Source: caspianseal.org)