FUR SEALS AND THE SEAL FISHERIES. 
a 
By CHARLES H. TOWNSEND, 
Director New Y ork Aquarium, New Y ork City, 
a 
The history of the world’s seal fisheries is largely one of wasted resources. 
Very few sealing industries have been conducted according to methods designed 
to perpetuate the race. Yet from acommercial point of view, seals are the most 
important of the carnivorous animals. As a group they are probably also the 
most abundant of the larger wild mammals at the present time. It is doubtful 
whether the herds of bison in America and of antelopes in Africa ever exceeded 
the seals in point of numbers. They are of world-wide distribution, and 
although the fur-seal fisheries of the North Pacific have received much inter- 
national consideration during recent years, they were formerly not the only 
seal fisheries of importance. The pursuit was at one time carried on in the 
Antarctic regions as well as in the Arctic. The Antarctic sealing grounds 
have long been exhausted commercially, however. 
All seals breed on land or on ice floes, and return, after their migrations, to 
their accustomed breeding places with great persistence. They can seldom 
be driven entirely away, stupidly lingering until brought near the point of 
extermination. So certain are they to return to their breeding grounds that 
the reestablishment of the different species soon follows the protection of these 
places. The safeguarding of depleted sealing grounds would, in fact, be a good 
business proposition even at this late day, if they could be protected under the 
authority of the various governments laying claim to such lands. 
ANTARCTIC SEALS, 
The various species of Antarctic fur seals (genus Arctocephalus) were found 
about the southern shores and islands of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, 
and the islands of the Antarctic generally. About the close of the eighteenth 
. century there sprang up a traffic in the skins of fur seals, and as the result of 
the many voyages to those distant regions enormous numbers of the animals 
were taken. By 1830 the supply of fur seals in the southern seas was nearly 
exhausted. The species exists to-day as mere remnants of the great herds that 
were once found in those regions. 
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