Sophisticated GPS technology has shown seals use man-made wind farms and pipelines as foraging grounds.
A research team tracked seals' movement, and found that many hunt near these structures, which could act as "artificial reefs," Cell Press reported.
The findings were published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 21.
"I was shocked when I first saw the stunning grid pattern of a seal track around Sheringham Shoal," which is an offshore wind farm in the United Kingdom, said Deborah Russell of the University of St Andrews. "You could see that the individual appeared to travel in straight lines between turbines, as if he was checking them out for potential prey and then stopping to forage at certain ones."
The team's data showed 11 harbor seals were active within Sheringham Shoal and Alpha Ventus, which is located in Germany. In both sites seals regularly entered the wind farms and tended to move in "grid-like" movement patterns as they foraged. Both gray and harbor seals seemed to be interested in the subsea pipelines, and sometimes followed them for up to 10 days at a time.
The researchers are unsure of what these findings mean for the future of seal hunting habits as aquatic wind farms grow in size and popularity. The team does not yet know if these structures increase the amount of prey available for hunting seals or of they simply concentrate them, making them easier to capture.
"Only a small proportion of our study seals utilized wind farms or pipelines," Russell said. "At present these structures cover a small proportion of the extent of the at-sea distribution of seals. As wind farms become more extensive, many more seals will likely be affected."
In the future the team hopes to further their research and gain more insight into the possible consequences associated with these man-made developments.
