French tagged seal visits Sussex

Up until now it has been assumed that the common seals that we see along the Sussex coast are either from the wash area or from the Chichester colony. Grey seals have been assumed to come from either further west or east. However a seal tagged in 2007 by the University of Rochelle crossed the English Channel

and swam east along the Sussex coast.

• The seal left the north coast of France on the 14.11.07 at 04.46 GMT
• It reached the IoW on the 15.11 at 05.48 and reached Selsey at 20.44,
• It swam eastwards along the coast and landed at Shoreham at 16.11 at 15.15
• It landed again east of Newhaven on the 17th at 01.33, carried on close to the coast and they lost contact just west of Hastings on the 17.11.07 at 12.44.

Basically the seal swam for 24 hours across the Channel then spent about 54 hours swimming from the IoW to Hastings, coming on to the shore occasionally.

Unfortunately the tag has malfunctioned and is no longer providing a signal of its location but is still transmitting dive and haul-out data so the seal is still
alive and behaving normally. The University (me also) is keen to locate the seal, which has a tell tale tag attached to its neck. The website below shows what the tag would look like.

 http://www.smru.st-and.ac.uk/Instrumentation/pageset.aspx?psr=287

Please let me know if you have any sightings or hear of any reports of a tagged seal.

Thanks

Steve Savage

Sussex country Recorder for Sea Mammals, Regional coordinator Sea Watch Foundation.