Status
This earless seal's former range extended throughout the Northwest Atlantic Africa, Mediterranean and Black Sea, coastlines, including all offshore islands of the Mediterranean, and into the Atlantic and its islands: Canary, Madeira, Ilhas desertas, Porto Santo... as far west as the Azores. Vagrants could be found as far south as Gambia and the Cape Verde islands, and as far north as continental Portugal and Atlantic France.
Several causes have provoked a dramatic population decrease over time: on one hand, commercial hunting (especially during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages) and, during the 20th century, eradication by fishermen, who used to consider it a pest due to the damage the seal causes to fishing nets when it preys on fish caught in them; and, on the other hand, coastal urbanization and pollution.
The species has gone extinct in the Sea of Marmara due to pollution and heavy ship traffic from the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. In addition, the last report of a seal in the Black Sea dates to the late 1990s.
Nowadays, its entire population is estimated to be less than 600 individuals scattered throughout a wide distribution range, which qualifies this species as Critically Endangered. Its current very sparse population is one more serious threat to the species, as it only has two key sites which can be deemed viable. One is the Aegean Sea (250–300 in Greece and some 100 in Turkey) and the other is the Western Saharan portion of Cabo Blanco (some 130 individuals which may support the small, but growing, nucleus in the Desertas Islands –approximately 20 individuals).
These two key sites are virtually in the extreme opposites of the species' distribution range, which makes natural population interchange between these two key sites impossible. All the other remaining subpopulations are composed of less than 50 mature individuals, many of them being only loose groups of extremely reduced size – often less than 5 individuals.
These other remaining populations are in Madeira, with 30 to 35 individuals, and the Desertas Islands (both in the Atlantic Ocean) and southwestern Turkey and the Ionian Sea (both in the eastern Mediterranean). The species status is virtually moribund in the western Mediterranean, which still holds tiny Moroccan and Algerian populations, associated with rare sightings of vagrants in the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and other western Mediterranean locations, including Gibraltar.
The last sightings of the Mediterranean Monk seal were made on May 2007 and on April 2010 in Sardinia, where a seal was even photographed, the increasing of the sightings in Sardinia, suggest that the seal has repopulated the Central eastern Sardinian coasts, preserved since 1998 by the National Park of Golfo of Orosei
Read more about this topic: Mediterranean Monk Seal
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