Fisheries and Maritime museum

Counting the seals

Danish biologists count seals in order to know how big the population is. They use some photos taken from an helicopter which flies along the coast. We could find an example in this photo which represents Romø’s island and its seals.

In order to count the seals in the photos, it’s important to divide them in parts to avoid counting two or more times the same seals.

There are two types of seals in Denmark: the common seal and the grey seal.

In this photo we could find an example of commonseal: it’s long about 1,5 metres and its weight goes from 60 to 100 kg. This seal is smaller than the grey.In Denmark this type is the most common.

In this photo we could find an example of a grey seal:it’s long about 2 metres and its weight is 300 kg. The female is smaller than the male.

DIVING BEHAVIOUR In the second part of the visit at the museum we studied the behaviour of seals in the pool: we checked the time when the submertion began and when it ended and then we calculate the time of the dive of the seals.In the two days we had completely different results because one of the two seals we studied (Rasmine) in the first day she dives a lot of times, while on Wednesday she didn’t dive so much.

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