For the last 12 years, volunteers have ventured out in freezing temperatures to Finland’s Lake Saimaa every winter. It is here that the Saimaa ringed seal — one of the world’s most endangered seal species — is trying to survive.
For most of history, the blistering cold winters drove snow into meters-high snow banks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, where the seals carved cozy dens to shelter from the elements and raise their pups.
But in recent decades, with increasing temperatures caused by climate change, snow drifts have failed to form in sufficient numbers.
“The seal gives birth in a lair it digs into a snowbank,” World Wildlife Fund officer Joonas Fritze explained in a video for WWF Finland.
“If there aren’t any snow banks, the pups are born on open ice and don’t have any protection against predators, cold, and human disturbance. Up to half of the pups could die.”
So, teams of scientists and human volunteers have constructed what nature is no longer providing: artificial snow drifts, formed with handheld snowplows, for the secluded seals.
Alongside bans on fishing with gill nets, and policies against hunting and industrial pollution, it’s working.
The seal population has rebounded to about 400, compared to lows of 100 seals in the 1980s.
About 320 of those seals — half of the population born since 2014 — were born inside these human-constructed shelters, according to MIT Technology Review.
With evolving designs and methods led by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, as well as the country’s parks agency and the support of organizations like WWF, this interspecies “co-design” offers great help for the seals.
But experts know it’s only the beginning.
“It’s great that we can help an endangered species like this,” Fritze continued, “but at the same time, we need a long-term plan, which includes taking quick action on climate change.”
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A version of this article was originally published in The 2024 Animals Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image by Juha Taskinen/WWF
