‘There is not any ice’: warming seas chill Quebec’s seal tourism | Surroundings

“There is no season this year. There is no ice cream, ”says Ariane Bérubé, sales manager at the Château Madelinot hotel on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec (also known as Îles de la Madeleine).

It’s not the first time the seal pup viewing season canceled – since 2010 the Gulf of St. Lawrence has had five winters with insufficient ice due to unusually warm temperatures.

“It takes four months to build a good ice sheet,” says Peter Galbraith, oceanographer at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and climate notes specialist for the Gulf. “You need December, January, February and March to be cold. This is the ice season. A few days at -20 ° C are not enough to form good ice. “

Little or no ice or poor quality ice is not only a problem for the tourists unable to land in a helicopter, but also a problem for seals. They migrate from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in December and give birth in late February to early March. As “ice-bound” animals, seals need ice as a platform to have their pups, nurse them and for the first few weeks after weaning, when the pups learn to swim and learn to feed themselves.

A seal on the Magdalene. Tourists who come to see the whitecoat pups generate as much income as the annual seal hunt. Photo: Art Wolfe / Getty

Mike Hammill, Head of the Marine Mammals Division and finfish or sealfish expert at DFO, says: “The ice has to be quality ice. Seals prefer ice floes that are at least 30 cm thick and about 36 meters wide. “

If the ice is too thin and unstable, puppies can die. “The ice is breaking off the waves,” says Hammill. “Or you will let a storm come through and the waves will knock the pieces of ice together and grind or break them. Some puppies can be crushed and others thrown into the water. If they are pushed back into the water repeatedly, they tire and drown. “

In the 1980s and 1990s, tourists visiting the “white-coat seals,” as the newborns are called, earned as much income as the annual seal hunt. “When I started in 1990 [seal tourism]was traveling with big guns at the time, ”says Hammill.

But the situation is now a serious concern for the islanders known as the Madelinots, many of whom have switched from seal hunting to seal tourism in the past few decades.

In the years when ice cover was constant, the viewing season for white-coat seals was four or five weeks. Now two weeks is a bonus. “We usually have a few hundred people during the season, that’s a lot of lost income,” says Mario Cyr, filmmaker, photographer, diver and seal pups expedition leader. “And it’s something we love to do that is incredibly nice to see.”

For several years, guests from all over the world came to see and photograph the puppies. “The Château Madelinot and the Îles de la Madeleine offer this experience in a unique way,” says Bérubé, “because the coast of the islands is really the main location for observing the largest seal nursery in the world and we have easy access to it. ”

A canceled season causes major disruptions and disappointments.

“2010 was our breaking point,” adds Bérubé. “It was the first year we had to cancel. We had 350+ people making reservations and we had to try and explain to them what was going on. It was the first time since 1958 that we had no ice cream. Then it happened again in 2011. And again in 2016 and 2017. And now this year. We found that there is a two year cycle every time we have to cancel. So will that happen again in 2022? “

Mario Cyr, a filmmaker who runs seal puppy tours, says, “We’re all wondering what’s going to happen.” Photo: Jean-Benoît Cyr

Cyr, a Madelinot born and raised, says the loss of business is bad, but he’s also saddened by what is happening to the seals. “Last year there were many more seal pups deaths than in previous years.” Due to the lack of ice in recent seasons, seals have had to turn east towards the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. “Sometimes mothers travel the Gulf for five or six days looking for a place with enough ice to have a child,” says Cyr.

Before 2010, an even ice cover was a matter of course on the islands. But after the last decade, “we all seriously wonder what’s going to happen,” says Cyr.

Whitecoat observation tourism is not an easy business, says Bérubé. “I’m selling something I’m not sure I can deliver. For the magic to happen, the stars and planets must be perfectly aligned – there must be ice, there must be seals. But when everything fits and we go through the season, customers appreciate a thousand times as much. “

Turning to the future, Cyr says he and his colleagues are concerned, but he knows that seal tourism off the Magdalene Islands will come to an end at some point.

“We have to remember that seals always return to the place where they were born. So if we skip a year like now, nothing genetically changes for the seals. But if it’s been three or four years in a row that the seals here don’t give birth to pups, they won’t come back because they changed their route of migration. For every year we lose there are fewer that will return. These are the effects of climate change that are really visible. “

When the winter is warm, seals can swim for days looking for an ice floe large enough to give birth. Photo: Mario Cyr

In 50 or even 30 years’ time, “there will likely be an even period of gulf sea ice and years without sea ice, and 50 years later we will almost never be,” says Galbraith.

Currently, Hammill claims that the seal population is in good shape at three feet.

“It doesn’t look good for them in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but we expect the distribution will shift over time,” he says. “They will gradually disappear from the Gulf. Instead of giving birth to a third of the seal pups there, perhaps all of the pups off the coast of Labrador will be born.”

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