Because of protection from the Fed Govt. the seal population has gone from a few dozen Grey Seals to about 6,000. That's right six thousand. The seals eat a lot of fish and the local commercial fishermen are upset.
People in Chatham were thinking about hiring Inuit Indians to kill the seals, but the Feds probably won't let Inuits kill these seals because it is not part of their traditional life style.
So now other ideas are being hashed about like loud speakers to drive the seals away.
This will only move the problem somewhere else. For the first time a friend of mine who lives in Plymouth Mass. has seen Grey Seals last month in his area. I bluefish over at Provincetown and for the first time last year we had to quit because of Grey Seals attacking the hooked bluefish. So you end up fighting a 400 lb seal on a light spinning rod. There were some shore places on Cape Cod that were great for surf fishing. No moe. The seals wait for a hookup and attack the hooked striper or bluefish. -tom
Provincetown night life entertainers would fill the sharks for a while until you moved the poor seals.
Something similar happened in California when the government began protecting sea otters, which had been driven to near-extinction. They also eat a lot of fish and shell fish. By the 1980's, sea otters had grown so numerous that the abalone and other shell fish--once abundant--became practically non-existent along the coast of Monterey County, and fisheries were also adversely affected.
Love FR; learn something new every day!
Sounds like time for some seal harvesting!
“When combined with an unknown number of immigrants from Canada, Muskeget’s pup production helped boost the gray seal numbers on the Cape and Islands from 5,611 adults in 1999 to 15,756 in 2011.
That number could be a conservative estimate as a percentage of seals are in the water and undetectable by aerial surveys.” - CapeCodOnline
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130120/NEWS/301200322&cid=sitesearch