The number of North Atlantic Harp seals is down to 4.7 million from 7.6 million says former DFO scientist Mike Hammill. Extract from Research Document “Estimating Abundance of Northwest Atlantic Harp Seal Using a Bayesian Modelling Approach”
In a recent review of the status of the Northwest Atlantic harp seal population, model fit to aerial survey estimates of pup production and annual reproductive rates was poor compared to previous assessments indicating underlying problems relating to model assumptions and/or structure. In this study, a new hierarchical Bayesian state-space model was fitted to the same data on pup production, annual fecundity, human removals, and environmental conditions used in the previous assessment to produce annual estimates of pup production and total abundance from 1952‒2019.
DFO Research Document page is here and direct link to a PDF Research Document (2023/068(PDF, 2,847 KB) for download is here
Also an interview with DFO retired scientist Mike Hamill and CBCNL radio The Broadcast can be heard here