Brenda Bramley, age 12, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for her question:
Does the harp seal differ from the hooded seal?
Yes he does. You may find them both lolling on the Arctic ice, but you can spot their differences from quite a distance. The harp seal will be with a group of .friends and relatives. On his light grey back there is a darker harp or saddle¬shaped design. The larger hooded seal, alias Bladdernose, is likely to be alone. He wears spots and seems to be balancing a smallish beach ball on his nose.
Most seals feel at home in chilly polar seas, where we find both the eared and the so called earless families. The fur coated eared seals have small external ears and they can use flippers to get around on ice and rocky shores. =hey are called the fur seals. The earless seals have hardly any external ears and are very, very clumsy on land because their flippers are small and weak. ?hey are called the hair seals because their fur is quite coarse.
The hooded seal and the harp seal are different species of the family Phocidae ¬the hair seals. Their coats may be somewhat coarse, but they are quite decorative. The harp seal is a blend of greys, darker above and paler below. He wears dark eye patches and perhaps a few dark patches along his sides, on his back, from tail to neck, there is a curved design that looks somewhat like a harp, though some call him the saddleback seal. His average length is six feet and usually old fatty weighs about 400 pounds.
The male hooded seal is nine feet long and weighs around 900 pounds, though the female is slightly smaller. The basic color of his hairy coat is grey, blotched all over with dark irregular patches that are two to three inches wide. The male hooded seal has a remarkable nose a smaller version of the trunk worn by his cousin the elephant seal
Actually there is a bag of loose skin that extends from between his eyes to his upper lip. When at peace with the world, usually this hood is empty and lies limp and saggy but when he chooses, he can blow it up like a balloon. about 12 inches long and nine inches high Also he may have an inflatable bag of loose pink skin in one of his nostrils usually inside the left nostril.
We would expect the hooded seal to inflate his balloon when annoyed or threatened. And so he does. But observers report that he also blows up his nose just to amuse himself; perhaps when quietly lolling on a chunk of ice. Sometimes he also inflates his pink nostril bag and the two balloons balanced on his nose create quite a display.
Both these hair seals spend the summer in northern Arctic waters, especially around Greenland. In winter they migrate southward.
The female harp seal bears a pair of fluffy white pups. In a few weeks, the herd of adults migrates south and the youngsters follow later. Pairs of solitary hooded seals join up when the female bears her single, blue black cub. They too migrate in a few weeks, though not too much is known about how or where they spend the winter.