Please welcome Nicola Mauro, who is doing an internship with us at the Icelandic Seal Center in collaboration with the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute. Nicola is a master student in Biology of organisms and ecology at UCLouvain (Belgium). In his internship, Nicola will be monitoring the abundance of harbour and grey seals with our research team. He will among others look at environmental and anthropogenic factors that might affect the behaviour and spatial distribution of the harbour seal.
Most of the visitors the Icelandic Seal Center gets, come from May to September, but we keep ourselves busy during the winter. In addition to being open every weekday 11:00 – 15:00 all winter, we work in accordance with our goals of seal research and sustainable seal watching.
Seal watching is extremely important to our local area, but it must be done responsibly, especially given the fact the Icelandic seal population is endangered. Although the vast majority of those who do seal watching do so responsibly, unfortunately we often hear that we can do better.
It was a great pleasure for us at the Seal Center to two grants from “Uppbyggingarsjóði Norðurlands vestra“ and „Landsbankinn“ bank to make an tutorial video on desirable behavior during seal watching. It is a short cartoon with little text making the message very understandable it. The design company Gagarín has already begun working on the design and layout and the film will be ready for the summer.
It will be available to all stakeholders free of charge and hopefully it will spread as widely as possible so that an important step can be taken towards more sustainable seal watching in Iceland.
We are extremely happy with the number of guests that visited us in August. In total over 6.800 guests came to the information center and the museum. To have many guests buying tickets to the museum or items in our souvenir shop is vital for our work at the Icelandic Seal Center. In accordance with this, we have decided to continue with the summer opening hours of 11:00 – 18:00 until (and including) 1. October.
July was really enjoyable at the Icelandic Seal Center with over 7.200 guests visiting our information center and museum about the seals and the walrus. We are really grateful for the support from our guests that buy tickets to the museum and/or items in our store.
