Distribution
The Baikal seal lives only in the waters of Lake Baikal. It is something of a mystery how Baikal seals came to live there in the first place. It can be speculated they swam up rivers and streams or possibly Lake Baikal was linked to the ocean at one point as the result of a large body of water, such as the West Siberian Glacial Lake or West Siberian Plain, formed in a previous ice age. The seals are estimated to have inhabited Lake Baikal for some two million years. The Baikal seal, the Saimaa ringed seal (Pusa hispida saimensis), and the Ladoga seal (Pusa hispida ladogensis) are the only exclusively freshwater seals.
The areas of the lake in which the Baikal seals reside change depending on the season, as well as some other environmental factors. Baikal seals are solitary animals for the majority of the year, sometimes living kilometers away from other Baikal seals. In general, there is a higher concentration of Baikal seals in the northern parts of the lake, because the longer winter keeps the ice frozen for longer, which is preferable for pupping. However, in recent years, there have been migrations to the southern half of the lake, possibly to evade hunters. In winter, when the lake is frozen over, seals maintain a few breathing holes over a given area and tend to remain nearby, not interfering with the food supplies of a nearby neighbour. When the ice begins to melt, the Baikal seals tend to keep to the shoreline.
Read more about this topic: Baikal Seal
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)