Habitat and Distribution

The habitat of the bearded seal is the arctic seas where the ice shifts and is thinned or kept open by strong currents (Kingsley and Stirling, 1991). Because of their benthic feeding habits, bearded seals usually keep to relatively shallow water areas, less than 200m deep (Lydersen et al. 1994). But studies have found that bearded seal dispersal is not dependent of abundance of prey (Burns, 1967).
Bearded seals have a circumpolar range. These seals are more or less resident, but can seasonally migrate with the advance and retreat of ice because they need to stay near the ice edge (Burns, 1967). In the Pacific arctic, in late winter and early spring, seals live on the southern edge of the Bering Sea ice and mostly south of the Bering Strait. Then during the spring seals migrate northward. During the late summer and early fall they reside more along the edge of the polar ice pack. Then during the fall they migrate with the southern movement of sea ice, but this migration is at a slower rate than during the spring.

Average Arctic summer ice (left) and winter ice (right) The black dot is the North Pole. Image courtesy of NOAA.

  
Near the northern part of Svalbard at 80 degrees north latitude in the summer. Image courtesy of Genny Anderson.