Social Spacing

Bearded seals have overlapping home ranges, but stay temporally separate from each other most of the time. The home range of the bearded seal is the undefended area where they obtain all of their resources. The evolution of a home range was probably influenced by the fact that seals need to eat a lot of food and that their food is scattered, relatively abundant in shallow waters, and generally non-defensible. Also because in the open ocean there is generally no ‘patch’ or area better than any other, defending a classical territory would have no point and would be too energetically expensive. Also many bearded seals migrate with the advance and retreat of the ice and this migration would make holding a territory for the whole year very difficult.

Social relationships

In general bearded seals are a solitary species and are noted as being generally unsociable. There have been occasional observations of these seals forming larger aggregations, but the reasons for these aggregations are unknown (Burns, 1967). Also observations have noted older male seals fighting with other seals when they meet on ice floes. In these records, the seals used their fore-flippers to fight. Also among bearded seals there is a high incidence of scars. There are two theories for this; one is that the scars are primarily from fighting with other seals in and out of the water; the other is that the scars are from polar bear predation (Burns, 1967). (See general description-predation)

Image courtesy of NOAA. Photographer: Lew Consiglieri, NOAA Corps. Taken April 1977.