Alaska’s ringed seal records concentrate on the North Slope, the state’s Arctic coast along the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. This is the species’ real home in US waters, not the Southeast Alaska fjords a couple of stray records point to; a ringed seal is built for landfast and pack ice, not the open water around Glacier Bay or Prince William Sound.
It’s the smallest true seal in Arctic waters, and the only one that builds its own shelter: a snow-roofed lair scratched out over a breathing hole in stable ice, where a female hides her pup from polar bears above and predators in the water below. On Alaska’s mainland coast, gray wolves and both red and Arctic foxes will also raid a lair within reach of shore, so that snow roof is doing real work.
Records here run in every month of the year, with the heaviest reports in October and November as seals concentrate near forming ice, and again through early summer as retreating ice pushes them closer to where people are watching from shore and boats.
This is one of the most frequently recorded marine mammals in Alaska’s occurrence data, largely because ringed seals are also thought to be the most numerous seal in the Arctic overall. But a lair-building, ice-dependent life leaves this species with little room to adapt if the snow and ice seasons it needs keep shortening.
Full species profile
