On November 4th, 2025 secondary investigator Jim Winter spoke with Dr. Mike Hammill and together they explored Hammill’s experiences working out of the Quebec region on seal research as a top scientist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Part 1 examines Hammill’s time working in the Canadian Arctic, observations on the impact of climate change on seals and their ecosystems and work on pup production. Hammill also discusses the practicalities of seal research and public engagement. These include the challenges associated with covering large, uncertain terrain, costs in doing ice-based fieldwork and disconnect at times in government engagement with local hunters/fishers which lack discursive space to enable community members to raise and discuss their concerns leading to instances of mutual frustration with engagement processes.
Jim Winter: Okay Mike, maybe the easiest thing to do is to start off with a snapshot, if you will, of your background in the whole thing with the science and DFO.
Mike Hammill: Well, I’m originally from Guelph Ontario. I got a contract to work in the Arctic when I finished my BSc. So that started out on a career of contracts in graduate school working on seals in the Canadian Arctic working with the Inuit. Then when I finished my PhD in McGill, I got a job… and that’s when I moved to Quebec in around 1989 and have been there ever since or have been here ever since, working on seals in the Gulf Saint Lawrence and Northern Canada, beluga whales in Northern Canada, Northern Quebec. So my background has always been with DFO, Arctic and Atlantic.
Winter: In your experience with the harp seals and the grey seals, there have been massive changes because of, shall we say, global warming? And what have been your observations or what have you found about seals in the Gulf region?
Hammill: The biggest change is the loss of the ice. I mean, we used to have ice that always formed during the winter and it built up and we had nice pupping conditions, especially off the Magdalen Islands where we based our work for 20 plus years. And the ice is no longer there, at least no longer there in a predictable manner. So it’s not to say that it’s disappeared completely, but you cannot count on the ice being present off the Magdalen Islands anymore, and in the last few years it’s changed so much. For the last 10 years ice has been very uncertain, very unpredictable. Now we may not make a decision to travel until mid-February, whereas before we always knew it was there, at least enough for us to work on, whereas when I started that was never a question. There was always ice. You could always count on it being there. So that’s probably the biggest single change.
Well, I mean the first part is that they obviously need ice to have their pups on. The ice has to be a decent quality so that after they have the pup, the pup will is safe. That’s no longer the case. One, the ice is not there. Or perhaps the more dangerous situation for seals is the ice is there, but it’s not really of good quality. And so you get storms coming through and they break up the ice. The pups are thrown in the water or the female can’t find them and so that ends up in high mortality, so. So it’s changes in quantity and quality of ice. Before we used to say, there’s some pups in the northern Gulf around Blanc Sablon, the Mecatina Patch, in the northern gulf, anywhere between Eastern Anticosti and Blanc Sablon but it was not of significance when I started and now if you were to look at it, it’s probably seals from the Front coming in, but it’s the Northern Gulf patch if we could call it that where it’s at as far as harp seals are concerned in the Gulf and that’s a bit hit and miss. There’s always some there, but where they end up exactly is not quite clear. It does it shifts between years. My point here is that there are no longer many seals in the southern Gulf. If seals are in the Gulf, most are in the north. If there is some ice that forms in the northern gulf, then it is probably the Mecatina Patch, but we see more and more the only real concentration of seals is made up of groups that blow in from the Front via the Strait of Belle-Isle.
Winter: A noticeable decline now.
Hammill: Well, pup production is just plummeted. I mean, I forget the last one. We’re down under 20,000 or so seals from up closer to 200,000 seals when the ice was very good. So you’ve seen a huge shift in the use of the Gulf by the seals. As far as the pupping area, we don’t know if it means that seals are no longer coming. We know they still use the Gulf for feeding, but we don’t know if it’s still to the same extent as it was before or has that decreased as well?
Winter: All this obviously is based on research and research costs money. Have you found that the funding is been consistent or inconsistent?
Hammill: At the start of the year, you would have a plan that would do what was needed to meet the DFO mandate, but people were reluctant to tell you at the start of the year that support was available. So, you start out and your proposed expenses are greater than what your budget is-this is called a funding pressure. During the year, other projects may not be able to spend all of their money-it could be that people were sick, there was bad weather, equipment was ordered but not delivered in time. The government would then ask in the fall, were there any budgets that were unable to spend what they were allocated. Given the size of the department there would be unspent money. At the same time, the department would ask do we have any funding pressures and the harp seal would be identified as a priority. It was easy in one sense because we relied on coast guard helicopter support. Because CCG [Canadian Coast Guard] was part of DFO this meant that paying for the helicopter involved an internal transfer meaning there was no need for having to deal with the very cumbersome and time wasting need to issue contracts.
Winter: So when you produce your results, you do your research, you do your population estimates, you do your various different studies that you have to carry out once you got the funds.
Hammill: So that was helpful for us.
Winter: Where does the role of the scientists producing the data stop and the, shall we say, science managers, for lack of a better term? I don’t know if they actually call them science managers or anything. Where does that take over? Where do, where, where do the scientists sort of? Fall to the wayside and something else takes over in determining what happens to that science.
Hammill: Once you complete your CSAS [Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat] documents for us that was sort of the end of our official role. Earlier on in the system we had a lot of exchange with the managers. There was one person that we had in particular who was very, very good. So they would have exchanges on what we felt to explain what we did. So they would say something on this paragraph. What do you mean by that? You need to cut it. Well, if you want to follow the management plan this, then this is what you should be doing. And then they would take that and I don’t know what happened within their side of the shop.
They would make the decision on whether to support the science or not. It could be a frustrating part. For many of the early years we had a lot of interaction with the managers. We had to justify our science and the managers had to deal with industry concerns and political concerns. What was nice was that we felt we were contributing and we were working with people who cared. As the big hunts drew to an end, we had less exchange, because there was less need perhaps.
Winter: Taking the hard science and trying to get it across to people, particularly in Europe and some to some degree, I guess in the United States, were you involved in any of that at all?
Hammill: I tried to keep my head low on some of that…I was involved more on the local, the regional level, speaking with the sealers on the science aspects, but I didn’t get in too much and of course the interviews, but I didn’t get into like the European Food Safety Authority. A colleague of mine based on Newfoundland dealt more with the European file on seal harvesting. It was very political. I continued on the regional meetings with the sealers and there were programs where I wanted to be present. The Front, where my colleague worked was where all the seals were – 75% approximately – but they are so far offshore that they are hard to access. In the Gulf, there are fewer seals, but they are close to shore so relatively easy to access. It was easier for me to go to the seal herds every year, which I wanted to do, but not so easy for my Newfoundland-based colleague.
Winter: Within the community, was it difficult given the situations that the fishermen were dealing with in a broad sense, not just sealing, to try and explain the role of science and what your science was telling you and when it came to seals? Was there sort of a gap of communication there?
Hammill: There was and still is a big frustration I think. The idea, I mean, we would go to a seal meeting and the way the management framework had been, the way everything had been set up, it would be a discussion on sealing. So sealing was to harvest seals to maximize money or profits from the seal industry so that was the discussion. Whenever people try to change it to discuss that seals are eating our fish, officials would say that’s not the subject of our meeting. We’d have a meeting to discuss sealing for the purposes of benefiting the sealing industry and then the fisherman would go to their ground fish meetings and they would say, well, we want you to discuss something like the seals are eating all the fish and the manager would say, well, that’s not our discussion. Our discussion is the ground fish stocks, so they’re up or they’re down this year or whatever and so there wasn’t a forum for them to try and have the discussion which they wanted to have that dealt with seals eating fish and that they’d want something to happen. That I think has been always been a frustrating aspect for everyone. I think because the forum, the four that we had where you discuss either hunting seals to kill seals for making money or you discuss fishing for the reasons of making money from fishing, but nobody really want to sit down, have that heavy discussion what are we going to do about the seals and what do you think the seals are doing?
Winter: So seal predation was always in people’s minds, not just a recent phenomenon.
Hammill: It’s always been there. I think I’ve always felt that there’s been less of a concern if you’re making money from seals, but it’s very hard for you to convince a fisherman that a seal is beneficial to them. If they’re making some money from seals, if it serves a purpose from somebody making their living, then it’s a tolerable acceptable or it’s appreciated because that’s an area especially in Newfoundland and in the Gulf where you don’t do a whole lot as a fisherman in the winter, so sealing is kind of the start of your spring activities.
Winter: Historically in Newfoundland, that was the case as well, the hungry month of March, as we used to say.
Hammill: Yes, and in the Gulf, you know you go into grey seals and you start running around a little bit in January, February. So you get a little bit of a lead time on the season. So that part once you stop the sealing though then people see well there you let one component of the ecosystem continue to eat fish, but you can’t eat those fish and yet you’re not doing anything about it. So I think that increases frustration and increases tensions.
Winter: There was sort of a feeling you’ve been telling us all along of the fisheries people, not the guys studying seals, the fishers that were being told they caused the decline of fish and now you’re telling us, oh, you’re not fishing, but the fish are still going down but we’re not catching or eating the fish. It was a bit of a conundrum.
Hammill: It is a conundrum and I think it’s frustrating for people in the communities because it’s their livelihood.
Winter: Yes, but essentially, unless there’s some dramatic climatic reversals, harp seal hunting as we once knew it in the Gulf is pretty well over.
Hammill: Yes, what we see now, I’d say, the industry that we knew as a hunting industry based on getting seals on the ice is essentially gone. What we still have in the Gulf is a little fishery where because as you know in our law, seals are fish technically under the Fisheries Act. So it’s in a way it’s still a fishery. So we still have a fishery in the area in the St Lawrence estuary, where the Saguenay River empties into the estuary. Communities nearby include Tadoussac and Les Escoumins. So there’s still a small industry there where they take a couple 100 seals every year and they’ll get seals that are on any ice or they’ll hunt them in the water so that’s one that usually goes on in late fall, early winter and then it may open up again in April, but it depends on how things are. Those harps may continue, but let’s call it a niche fishery, a niche hunt.
[To be continued]
Seals, Stigma and Survival 