Alaska News

New guidelines say Alaska cruise, tour ships should stay 500 yards from seals

A 100-yard buffer is not good enough to protect seals in Alaska's glacial fjords from cruise-ship and tour-boat disturbances, so federal regulators have issued new guidelines advising the ships to stay about 500 yards away.

The new guidelines, issued Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, are described as "voluntary but strongly recommended" and aimed at the burgeoning ship traffic around scenic tidewater glaciers that draw both harbor seals and tourists.

"These guidelines are intended to provide additional protection for harbor seals, while continuing to offer high quality glacial viewing opportunities to visitors and locals alike," Jon Kurland, assistant regional administrator for protected resources in NOAA Fisheries' Alaska Region, said in a statement.

The 100-yard-buffer guideline was established in the 1990s, and most ship operators comply with it, said NOAA spokeswoman Julie Speegle. But recent studies show that harbor seals are disturbed by ships well beyond 100 meters or about 110 yards, and that such disturbances make young, nursing pups especially vulnerable, NOAA officials said.

One NOAA study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, found that up to 14 percent of all the seals in a fjord flushed into the water when a cruise ship was present. A previous study, published in 2010, found that harbor seals were 25 times more likely to enter the water when cruise ships were 100 meters away than they were if the ships were 500 meters or 547 yards away.

An Alaska Department of Fish and Game study published in May also found seals were more likely to stay in the water or return to the water if ships were present. That study evaluated data gathered from 2008 to 2010 from radio transmitters affixed to 107 seals in Endicott Arm in Southeast Alaska and from time-lapse photography in the area. It found that the most important haulout periods were at midday and during the June pupping season; disturbances could be minimized if ship approaches were limited to early-morning and evening hours, the study said.

Tour-ship traffic in the glacial fjords of Southeast and Southcentral Alaska has increased 10-fold since the 1980s, NOAA scientists say. Still, the activity is largely unregulated at four of the five most-visited sites -- Tracy Arm, Endicott Arm and Disenchantment Bay in Southeast and College Fjord in Prince William Sound. The final destination, Glacier Bay National Park, does have mandatory restrictions to protect harbor seals hauled out on the ice during the critical pupping season. The concern is that disturbances would separate mothers and nursing pups.

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Even in Glacier Bay, harbor seals were disturbed by cruise ships at distances just under 500 meters, concluded a NOAA study published in 2014.

Though voluntary, the seal-protecting guidelines can help ship operators avoid legal problems, Speegle said. By adhering to the 500-meter buffer, ship operators can avoid violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, she said.

Technically, a "take" under the federal law is anything that causes "any change of behavior on the part of the marine mammal," she said. Ship traffic that causes seals to leave the ice haulouts could be considered unauthorized takes, though there are exceptions for navigational safety, she said.

There can also be public pressure to keep ships in compliance with the new guideline, Speegle said.

"Part of having voluntary guidelines like these to be effective is making sure the public knows about it and know why they're there," she said.

The new NOAA guidelines come as an international body is establishing somewhat similar guidelines to protect marine mammals and seabirds in the Aleutian Islands.

The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Safety Committee last month approved establishment of five "areas to be avoided" by large ships transiting the Aleutian region.

The IMO guidelines, scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, set a voluntary buffer of 50 nautical miles around islands used by endangered Steller sea lions, threatened sea otters and various species of seabirds. The guidelines are based on recommendations made in the Aleutians Island Risk Assessment, a project launched in 2010 and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

That new, voluntary buffer will add only 10 nautical miles to the routes of ships traveling the Great Circle cargo route between North America and Asia, the IMO committee and Aleutians risk-assessment group concluded.

Yereth Rosen

Yereth Rosen was a reporter for Alaska Dispatch News.

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