Wildlife
Ringed seal
Ringed seals are the smallest and most common earless seals living in the Arctic. They are specially adapted to live and breed in the Arctic ice, building ice caves above their breathing holes to protect their pups from predators such as polar bears. They excavate these lairs by scraping at the ice with their front flippers. There are several subspecies of the ringed seal, two of which live in freshwater lakes in Finland and Russia.
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Risky strategy
Frozen Planet
Ringed seals are vulnerable to predators as they must stay close to breathing holes in the ice.
Ringed seals are vulnerable to predators as they must stay close to breathing holes in the ice.
Bear alert
Living Planet
Ringed seals become ultra-wary when polar bears haul out on to the ice.
Ringed seals become ultra-wary when polar bears haul out on to the ice.
Distribution
The Ringed seal can be found in a number of locations including: Arctic, North America, Russia. Find out more about these places and what else lives there.
Habitats
The following habitats are found across the Ringed seal distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.
Behaviours
Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.
Predation defence
Adapted to swimming
Carnivorous
Maternal care
Moulting
Polygynous
Active at birth
Predator
Cold tolerant
Territorial
ViviparousAdditional data source: Animal Diversity Web
Conservation Status
Least Concern
- EX - Extinct
- EW
- CR - Threatened
- EN - Threatened
- VU - Threatened
- NT
- LC - Least concern
Population trend: Unknown
Year assessed: 2008
Classified by: IUCN 3.1
About
The ringed seal (Pusa hispida), also known as the jar seal and as netsik or nattiq by the Inuit, is an earless seal (family: Phocidae) inhabiting the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. The ringed seal is a relatively small seal, rarely greater than 1.5 m in length, with a distinctive patterning of dark spots surrounded by light grey rings, whence its common name. It is the most abundant and wide-ranging ice seal in the northern hemisphere: ranging throughout the Arctic Ocean, into the Bering Sea and Okhotsk Sea as far south as the northern coast of Japan in the Pacific, and throughout the North Atlantic coasts of Greenland and Scandinavia as far south as Newfoundland, and include two freshwater subspecies in northern Europe. Ringed seals are one of the primary prey of polar bears and have long been a component of the diet of indigenous people of the Arctic.
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Classification
Elsewhere on the web
- Animal Diversity Web (animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu)
- Ringed seals and climate change (PDF) (cmsdata.iucn.org)
- Interesting facts about ringed seals (afsc.noaa.gov)
- ARKive: Images of Life on Earth (arkive.org)
- More about the ringed seal (nmfs.noaa.gov)
- Ringed seal fact sheet (pinnipeds.org)
- Ringed seal (wikipedia.org)
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