BEARDED SEALS OF SVALBARD

The Bearded Seal

Bartrobbe — the bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus) — is a familiar and charismatic presence in the high Arctic waters surrounding Svalbard, Norway. 

Large, solitary, and unmistakable with its luxuriant moustache of stiff vibrissae, this species is superbly adapted to life along the drifting margins of sea ice. 

Adults can exceed 400 kilograms in mass, with thick blubber for insulation and broad, flexible foreflippers that allow them to haul out on ice floes or shallow shorelines with surprising ease.

Bearded seals are benthic specialists. Rather than chasing fast-moving prey in the water column, they forage along the seafloor, using their extraordinarily sensitive whiskers to detect vibrations and textures in soft sediments. 

Their diet reflects this lifestyle and includes clams, mussels, polychaete worms, crabs, shrimp, snails, and demersal fishes such as sculpins and flatfish. Powerful suction feeding allows them to extract prey directly from shells or sediment, leaving distinctive feeding pits on the seabed—clear signatures of their presence even when the seals themselves are out of sight.

The Bearded Seal

Unlike many other pinnipeds, bearded seals are not strongly colonial. Outside of the breeding season they are largely solitary, loosely distributed across ice-covered continental shelves. 

Mating occurs in spring, typically from April to May, when males establish underwater display areas rather than surface territories. 

Courtship is acoustic: males produce long, haunting trills and sweeping calls beneath the ice, audible over kilometres, to attract receptive females. 

After mating, implantation of the embryo is delayed, a reproductive strategy shared with many seals, resulting in a total gestation of roughly 11 months. 

Pups are born the following spring on drifting sea ice and are remarkably precocial, entering the water within hours and weaned after only two to three weeks—one of the shortest lactation periods among seals.

In the fossil record, bearded seals belong to the family Phocidae, a lineage that diversified during the Miocene as cold-adapted marine ecosystems expanded in the Northern Hemisphere. 

While Erignathus barbatus itself does not appear as a clearly identifiable species until the late Pleistocene, its ancestry is represented by fossil phocids from Miocene and Pliocene deposits across the North Atlantic and Arctic margins. 

Fragmentary remains—skulls, mandibles, and limb bones—document the emergence of large, bottom-feeding seals adapted to shallow continental shelves, particularly in regions influenced by cooling climates and seasonal ice. 

Pleistocene deposits in northern Europe, Siberia, Alaska, and Arctic Canada contain remains attributable to Erignathus, telling us that bearded seals expanded their range alongside advancing ice sheets during glacial cycles.

Today, Bartrobbe and its kin remain tightly bound to Arctic sea ice, making them sensitive indicators of environmental change. Their long evolutionary history, traced through shifting climates and frozen seas, underscores just how finely tuned they are to the rhythms of ice, sound, and sediment in the polar oceans—a living echo of the Arctic’s deep past.