Tag Archives: Peter Trull
Cape Cod Gray seals’ impact comes into focus for students that quantified the numbers
In April, Aaron Knight flew a small plane along the shore of South Monomoy Island off the Chatham coast, taking an aerial video of a seal-lined beach below him. Among the many who saw the film on Facebook was Peter Trull, field naturalist, author and a seventh-grade science teacher at Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Harwich. Like everyone, he was amazed. One Facebook post quipped there appeared to be “trillions of seals.” Maybe not trillions, but the images did beg the question, how many? But one unanswered question, Trull said, is how many seals are there? “There’s no number,” he said. “There are estimates and some speculation, but no number.” In the aerial images, Trull saw an opportunity to find the answer. Trull has done many aerial counts of various species for NOAA, the Center for Coastal Studies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service. Trull combined his expertise with a lesson for his students. Read the rest here 17:21
“The Gray Curtain: The Impact of Seals, Sharks & Commercial Fishing on the Northeast Coast,”
In the book’s first section he tells what kinds of seals are around, describing their behavior and ecology. He tracks the rise of gray seals since 1990 from a few to thousands, discussing the antipathy fishermen have to them while giving us facts about their eating habits. He is not a sentimentalist but looks at the realities of animals’ relationship to their predators and prey, as well as the complexities of human interaction with their environment. Finding a young harp seal on the outer beach bloodied by coyotes, he leaves it to become part of the food chain, only to find people attempting to save it. Read the rest here 11:02
