By Eliot Baker
I&M Staff Writer

An air of healthy vitality surrounded the 5,000 couch-sized gray seals splayed across Muskeget’s northern shore Monday.

Sporadic courtships – more combat than romance – erupted along the beach as exhausted females roughly the size of Shaquille O’Neal were body-slammed into submission by their twice-as-heavy suitors. Meanwhile, week-old pups the color of picked cotton snuggled against the sand, surrounded by bulls frequently bashing each other over alpha dominance.

But as brutally healthy as the scene appeared, the fragility of the gray seals’ existence was also on display.

A chalky seal pup flopped haplessly from female to female seeking its mother, but to no avail. Able to care only for their own progeny during a month-long fasting period during the breeding, nursing and weaning process, the adult cows either ignored the pillow-sized baby or snarled it away. The baby seal was more than likely doomed, as roughly 40 percent are lost in their first year due to predators, disease or, as likely in this case, abandonment.

“When I started coming out here in 1984, you didn’t see any of this. There were no seals,” said Blair Perkins, whose catamaran Shearwater transported three separate research teams and a volunteer animal stranding corps to Muskeget Monday.

Since colonial times, a culture of misinformation has led to the decimation of gray seal populations worldwide. At one point, their numbers dwindled to just a few dozen in the United States amid an extermination campaign based on the faulty theory that gray seals were primarily responsible for depleting fish stocks. Until 1962, the state of Massachusetts doled out a bounty for dead seals.

Perkins, a Nantucket native, has watched gray seals crawl back from the brink of extinction to establishing the country’s largest colony on Muskeget, whose waters are packed with tiny feeding fish and are too shallow for sharks and killer whales, making it a paradise for gray seals.

Their rebound followed the 1972 federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, which ended the indiscriminate killing and made it illegal to come within 150 feet of them or disturb them in any way. In North America, gray seals now number roughly 150,000 according to Sarah Oktay, who as director of the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s Nantucket Field Station off Polpis Road coordinates research on Muskeget.

The gray seals’ scientific name is Halichoerus grypus and is derived from the Greek words Halios (of the sea), khoiros (pig), and grypos (hook-nosed). The “hooked-nosed pig of the sea” is named for the distinctive shape of the male’s head.

Muskeget is the southernmost-breeding colony for this species. Other colonies include Sable Island, the coasts of Ireland and Great Britain, and closer to home, Monomoy Island off Cape Cod.

The seals breed between early December and late January, when large numbers come ashore on both Muskeget and Monomoy Island. About 11 and a half months after breeding, seal pups are born. The seals find Muskeget an ideal place to procreate and wean their young because the island is essentially uninhabited by man or beast at this time of year.

Gray seals are a large species, with males growing up to eight feet long and weighing up to 685 pounds. The male life span is approximately 25 years. Females grow up to seven feet long, weigh between 225 and 400 pounds and can live as long as 35 years. The female seals can bear one pup each year.

Males tend to have dark gray skin with light spots, while females are generally lighter with dark spots. The young pups retain their white coats for several weeks on land before setting out to sea with their mature coloration. The pups are about three feet long and 22-40 pounds at birth, and gain about four to five pounds per day when nursing. After between 10 days and three weeks of nursing, the mother seals abandon their young, leaving the pups to fend for themselves.

Today, scientists go to great extremes to fill in the many knowledge gaps remaining in the seals’ behavior and numbers. Those converging on Muskeget Monday were collaborating by pooling their respective research tools of aerial population photos, DNA sampling and tagging. Some even spent more than a month on the deserted island to observe breeding behavior.

Three students from the University of New England in Maine arrived on Muskeget before Christmas to spend six weeks huddled in a wood-stove-heated cabin without Internet or cell phone reception, living on canned tuna and camping food. The students have braved a bitter, snow-and-wind-swept cold snap to crawl into blinds – outhouse-like observing stations – to examine male mating strategies for Jocelyn Saracino-Brown’s graduate thesis.

What they discovered is that despite the immediately obvious size discrepancy, it’s a hard swim for both sexes to get to the top of the gene pool. Females arriving on shore are first attacked by weaker males, whose advances must be fought off in the interest of finding stronger mates. From there, females continue to fight off as many suitors as they can to reach more remote inland areas where dominant males preside over harems of three to five females. Once a cow finds her bull, she tends to stand by her man, fighting off other bulls seeking alpha status. It’s evolution’s answer to climbing the corporate ladder.

University of New England marine biology program coordinator Kathryn Ono was excited about Saracino-Brown’s focus on the bulls, since prior mating strategy research centered primarily around females.

“Some mate with a lot, others mate with none. You want to be the one with many,” said Ono, adding that this research marks the second year in Saracino-Brown’s examination into how males achieve such ends. Ono was proud of her students’ work and enthusiasm, saying this was as tough an assignment as any she’d seen in Alaska, where her early seal research had taken her.

Harsh as the environment was, the students were all smiles Monday.

“The six weeks here are totally worth it to be around the seals,” said Kristy Volker, a marine-biology major who aspires to work with animal stranding teams. Volker was also pleasantly surprised Monday when she boarded the Shearwater to find her boyfriend had traveled from Virginia Beach to propose to her in the most tender expression of love on Muskeget that day.

By getting so close to the seals, Volker has witnessed blood-soaked battles between males along with kinder, rarely-seen behavior such as when a cow adopted an abandoned calf.

While acknowledging the impressive wind and snow storms that swept Muskeget during her stay, Volker tried to shrug off the challenging conditions as simply being necessary for important research. But Perkins put into perspective the girls’ toughness, saying he’d never seen another research team brave such elements for so long. They had to carry six weeks’ worth of gear, food, water and heating wood to shelter on their first day, and have lived without daily communication with the outside world.

“You guys are radical,” Perkins affirmed. “Six weeks alone on Muskeget in the dead of winter – this is as extreme as it gets.” So extreme, in fact, that Perkins was worried how the students would get off the island if the frigid temperatures did not let up. “If ice becomes a problem, your only option is a helo-rescue.”

While not as physically extreme, the research conducted by other scientists was no less important. Stephanie Wood from UMass-Boston has continued the population-survey studies pioneered by Valerie Rough 40 years ago. Through aerial photos, Wood estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 gray seals inhabit Muskeget. While aerial surveys are the most efficient way to count seals, they are not fool-proof.

“Counting on the ground validates the aerial surveys,” said Wood, who instructed her team to count every 10th seal pup, whose numbers have tended to stabilize at around 2,000 per year on Muskeget.

The nature of the population is also better examined on the ground. Researchers wonder whether the seals are loyal residents of Muskeget or if they commute from Canada’s Sable Island, which sustains the world’s largest seal population. Fidelity to areas can be observed through DNA analysis, tagging, branding or photographic IDs.

A team from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies on the Shearwater was seeking out animals who appeared unique due to their coloring or scars. The team photographed them and compiled a database with hopes of identifying the same animals at the same location the following year.

Seal enthusiasts should remember that the scientists were allowed on-island only after an extensive permitting process under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Gray seals may be cute, but their wildness can make them dangerous. And it’s vital to their continued survival that they aren’t harassed. Approaching a mother could cause her to abandon her pup, thereby dealing a blow to the seal’s resurgence.

“It’s definitely a success story,” said Wood. “They were nearly extirpated and now the population has recovered largely on its own just by leaving them alone.”