A whitecoat is a newborn harp or grey seal with soft, white fur.
A whitecoat is a newborn harp or grey seal with soft, white fur.
Newborn seals have yellow fur because of amniotic fluid, and are still wet. When the pup dries, it is called a yellowcoat. The amniotic stain fades and the fur turns white within a few days, and it gets the name whitecoat. First it's called a thin whitecoat, and when it becomes visibly fatter it is a fat whitecoat. [1]
Nursing lasts for about 12 days. Cows frequently return to their pups to suckle. While she is suckling, the mother does not eat—rather, she draws on her reserves of fatty blubber to produce the milk. Pups grow rapidly, at the end of nursing, most pups weigh 36 kg (80 lbs) or more. The mothers then leave their fully fed pups and join the bulls to mate. At this age of about 12 days, pups first become "greycoats", [2] as grey juvenile coloring grows under their white fur, then "ragged-jackets" when white fur begins to fall out in patches.
The United States banned the hunting and import of whitecoats in 1972, through the Marine Mammal Protection Act. [3] The European Economic Community banned the import of whitecoat products in 1983. [4] [5] Canada banned the offshore commercial hunting of whitecoats and bluebacks on December 30, 1987. [6]
Otters are carnivorous mammals in the subfamily Lutrinae. The 13 extant otter species are all semiaquatic, aquatic or marine, with diets based on fish and invertebrates. Lutrinae is a branch of the Mustelidae family, which also includes weasels, badgers, mink, and wolverines, among other animals.
Pinnipeds, commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals. They comprise the extant families Odobenidae, Otariidae, and Phocidae. There are 33 extant species of pinnipeds, and more than 50 extinct species have been described from fossils. While seals were historically thought to have descended from two ancestral lines, molecular evidence supports them as a monophyletic lineage. Pinnipeds belong to the order Carnivora; their closest living relatives are bears and the superfamily of musteloids, having diverged about 50 million years ago.
The Baikal seal, Lake Baikal seal or nerpa, is a species of earless seal endemic to Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. Like the Caspian seal, it is related to the Arctic ringed seal. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest true seals and the only exclusively freshwater pinniped species. A subpopulation of inland harbour seals living in the Hudson Bay region of Quebec, Canada, the Saimaa ringed seal and the Ladoga seal are found in fresh water, but these are part of species that also have marine populations.
The grey seal is found on both shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is a large seal of the family Phocidae, which are commonly referred to as "true seals" or "earless seals". It is the only species classified in the genus Halichoerus. Its name is spelled gray seal in the US; it is also known as Atlantic seal and the horsehead seal.
The leopard seal, also referred to as the sea leopard, is the second largest species of seal in the Antarctic. Its only natural predator is the killer whale. It feeds on a wide range of prey including cephalopods, other pinnipeds, krill, birds and fish. It is the only species in the genus Hydrurga. Its closest relatives are the Ross seal, the crabeater seal and the Weddell seal, which together are known as the tribe of Lobodontini seals. The name hydrurga means "water worker" and leptonyx is the Greek for "thin-clawed".
The hooded seal is a large phocid found only in the central and western North Atlantic, ranging from Svalbard in the east to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the west. The seals are typically silver-grey or white in color, with black spots that vary in size covering most of the body. Hooded seal pups are known as "blue-backs" because their coats are blue-grey on the back with whitish bellies, though this coat is shed after 14 months of age when the pups molt.
The harp seal, also known as saddleback seal or Greenland seal, is a species of earless seal, or true seal, native to the northernmost Atlantic Ocean and Arctic Ocean. Originally in the genus Phoca with a number of other species, it was reclassified into the monotypic genus Pagophilus in 1844. In Greek, its scientific name translates to "ice-lover from Greenland," and its taxonomic synonym, Phoca groenlandica translates to "Greenlandic seal."
The Juan Fernández fur seal is the second smallest of the fur seals, second only to the Galápagos fur seal. They are found only on the Pacific Coast of South America, more specifically on the Juan Fernández Islands and the Desventuradas Islands. There is still much that is unknown about this species. Scientists still do not know the average life span of this species, or the diet and behavior of males apart from the breeding season.
The Galápagos fur seal breeds on the Galápagos Islands in the eastern Pacific, west of mainland Ecuador.
The brown fur seal, also known as the Cape fur seal, South African fur seal and Australian fur seal, is a species of fur seal. It is the only member of the monotypic genus Arctocephalus.
Arctophoca forsteri is a species of fur seal found mainly around southern Australia and New Zealand. The name New Zealand fur seal is used by English speakers in New Zealand; kekeno is used in the Māori language. As of 2014, the common name long-nosed fur seal has been proposed for the population of seals inhabiting Australia.
Seal hunting, or sealing, is the personal or commercial hunting of seals. Seal hunting is currently practiced in ten countries: United States, Canada, Namibia, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Finland and Sweden. Most of the world's seal hunting takes place in Canada and Greenland.
The ribbon seal is a medium-sized pinniped from the true seal family (Phocidae). A seasonally ice-bound species, it is found in the Arctic and Subarctic regions of the North Pacific Ocean, notably in the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk. It is distinguished by its striking coloration, with two wide white strips and two white circles against dark brown or black fur.
Fur clothing is clothing made of furry animal hides. Fur is one of the oldest forms of clothing, and is thought to have been widely used as hominids first expanded outside Africa. Some view fur as luxurious and warm; others reject it due to personal beliefs of animal rights. The term 'fur' is often used to refer to a coat, wrap, or shawl made from the fur of animals. The most popular kinds of fur in the 1960s were blond mink, silver striped fox and red fox. Cheaper alternatives were pelts of wolf, Persian lamb or muskrat. It was common for ladies to wear a matching hat. In the 1950s, a must-have type of fur was the mutation fur and fur trimmings on a coat that were beaver, lamb fur, Astrakhan and mink.
A ragged-jacket is the name given to a harp or grey seal pup when it is undergoing its first moult, and the intermediate stage between a "whitecoat" and a "beater". The moulting begins when the pup is at an age of about 12–14 days, at which time they cease nursing. At this young age, the pups are not yet capable of swimming. The pup stays on the ice for about two weeks before the fur has moulted. It does not feed during this time and therefore loses weight. When the white fur has been completely shed at around four weeks of age, the seal is called a "beater".
White coat may refer to:
Canada's 2008 annual commercial seal hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Newfoundland, Quebec and Nova Scotia began on March 28. The hunting season lasts from mid-November to mid-May, but the hunt mainly occurs in March and April. Canada's seal hunt is the world's largest hunt for marine mammals.
The harborseal, also known as the common seal, is a true seal found along temperate and Arctic marine coastlines of the Northern Hemisphere. The most widely distributed species of pinniped, they are found in coastal waters of the northern Atlantic, Pacific Oceans, Baltic and North Seas.
Brian Davies is an animal welfare activist who was the founder of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in 1969; IFAW became one of the world's largest animal welfare organisations. Davies retired from IFAW in 2003 but remains active in animal welfare through two organisations he founded, Network for Animals and the Political Animal Lobby.
The European Union banned seal products in 2009 for reasons of animal welfare. The ban was a continuation of a sealskin ban by the European Economic Community imposed in 1983.
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