It's been quiet with respect to public news on the seal mortalities off Morocco. Here is one item that just came my way. It doesn't tell us much about the connection to toxic algae, other than that it is still unclear.

Don Anderson

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 11:24:00 GMT

Race against clock to save rare seals

By Amanda Brown, Environment Correspondent, PA News

Vets are working against the clock to find out what is killing Europe's rarest mammal.

The Mediterranean Monk Seal faces extinction unless a desperate gamble is taken with the lives of the remaining few specimens, an Edinburgh meeting of the British Veterinary Association was told. Only around 500 seals remain, living mostly in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey where pressure from mass tourism is forcing them off the quiet sandy beaches they need to rear their pups. There is also a small colony in the Atlantic and they breed along a small stretch of the Moroccan coast.

Professor John Harwood Head of the Sea Mammal Research Unit in St Andrews, said a mysterious epidemic killed at least 120 seals earlier this year. Vets are now trying to find the cause and prevent a recurrence wiping out the surviving population.

The seals were either poisoned by toxic algae or hit by a virus similar to the one which killed thousands of common seals in the North Sea during the 1980s. But there is still no agreement on which was responsible - most of the seals washed up on the North African coast were too badly decomposed to give definitive answers.

Algal blooms occur roughly every 10 years in that area and if they were the cause, the next time could finish off the remaining population, said Prof Harwood. The only solution may be to try to establish a new colony around the Canary Islands where the algae does not occur. But this strategy is very risky as the seals might die as a result of capturing and transporting them. Taking them away would further reduce the survival chances of the remaining group.

Adult seals would probably try to swim back to their original home and so the best bet would be to try to capture young seals. However, young animals are more likely to die of other causes and so scientists would have to take a larger group to guarantee that enough animals survive to adulthood. If scientists think the gamble is worth taking, it could be five or six years before they know whether it has paid off, Prof Harwood said.