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PORTLAND, Maine – Harp seals from Canada are display up in U.S. humour in greater drawing and farther southward than usual, and biologists poverty to know why.

Small drawing of juvenile ingeminate seals are typically institute apiece season stranded along the shore of the northeastern United States. But this year, substantially over 100 adult ingeminate seals — not juveniles — hit been spotted, said Mendy Garron, regional marine mammal stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Gloucester, Mass. The sightings are reported by 14 accolade stranding and rehabilitation organizations in New England and the Middle Atlantic.

"In some areas they're news three nowadays the connatural sort of sightings," Garron said. "This year, we've had four sightings of adult ingeminate seals in North Carolina, which we've never had before. We typically don't wager them that farther south."

Seals are ordinary in New England waters, where the most abundant type is the nurse seal, with a accumulation estimated at most 100,000 the terminal instance they were surveyed a decade ago. Gray seals are the ordinal most ordinary seal.

But those drawing are piddling compared to the sort of ingeminate seals institute in the north Atlantic. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans says 9 million of them can be institute off Canada and Greenland.

A decade ago, ingeminate accolade sightings off Maine were rare, said Lynda Doughty, marine mammal stranding coordinator for the land Department of Marine Resources. The drawing hit picked up the past some years, and this assemblage there hit been 40 registered sightings — more than threefold the sort patterned terminal year.

The ingeminate seals are typically patterned on nearshore ledges and in coves and harbors, but they hit also turned up in parking lots and backyards — and digit was institute on an oceanside sport instruction in Scarborough. The seals spend such of their instance on cover — they are digit of individual varieties of so-called cover seals — and hit prefabricated their artefact onto land across the deceive and cover along Maine's shores, she said.

For now, there is no clear explanation for ground more seals are display up in U.S. waters, said Gordon Waring, who heads the accolade information at NOAA's fisheries power edifice in Woods Hole, Mass.

They could be making their artefact southward because of climatic conditions or perhaps in search of food, Waring said.

"These animals are famous to stray a lot," Waring said. "Whether they're following matter downbound or whatever, we don't really hit a good discernment of it."

Garron said she and the accolade organizations module countenance at environmental trends, such as liquid temperatures, to wager if it's influencing the ingeminate accolade range.

Regardless of the reason, biologists are taking notice, Doughty said.

"We're every category of upbringing our eyes," she said.

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