Erignathus barbatus
The largest true seal in the Arctic, and the loudest singer under the ice.
The bearded seal is the heaviest true seal in the Arctic, and it looks slightly wrong in a way that is hard to place at first. The body is large and barrel-shaped, roughly 2.1 to 2.4 metres long by NOAA's figures, around 260 to 360 kilograms, with some reference works giving an even wider range. Set on top of all that bulk is a comically small head.
The coat is plain greyish-brown with no rings, bands or bold spots. Many individuals have a rust-orange stain across the face, throat and front flippers, picked up from iron-rich mud they have been rooting through on the seafloor. The front flippers are squared off at the ends, which is why the species is also called the square-flipper seal.
Then there is the moustache. A broad fan of long, pale whiskers spreads forward from the muzzle. Wet, they hang straight. As they dry on the ice, the tips coil into tight ringlets. No other seal's whiskers do that.
Bearded seals feed on the bottom of the sea. Their prey is shrimp, crab, clams, whelks and bottom-hugging fish such as cod and sculpin, and a lot of it is buried in mud or tucked into sediment where no eye can find it. The whiskers are the search system. Seal whiskers, properly called vibrissae, are wired into dense bundles of nerves and work as fine mechanical detectors. A bearded seal sweeps them across the seafloor the way you would sweep a hand through sand looking for a dropped key.
Once something is located, the seal switches methods. Instead of biting, it snaps its tongue backward to create sudden negative pressure and sucks the animal straight out of the sediment. Suction feeding is quiet, precise, and ideal for soft-bodied prey that would fall apart if it were bitten.
Feeding this way sets a hard limit on where they can live. NOAA notes that bearded seals generally stay in water less than about 200 metres deep. Their range is really the overlap of two things: sea ice to rest and give birth on, and a seafloor shallow enough to reach. Where those two stop overlapping, bearded seals cannot live.
From late March, the water beneath the Arctic ice starts to sound like a science fiction film. Male bearded seals produce a long, spiralling, descending trill that usually runs over a minute and can last as long as three, often finishing in a low moan. NOAA reports that some of these trills carry about 12 miles, roughly 20 kilometres.
The anatomy behind the sound is unusual. In most northern seals, the cartilage rings that hold the windpipe open are complete circles. In bearded seals, most of those rings are incomplete, with a membrane bridging the gap, and researchers think this modified windpipe is connected to the voice.
Singing peaks from late March to late June, which is exactly the breeding and pupping season. Males come back to the same patches of water year after year and sing to hold them, the way a songbird holds a territory in a hedge.
A bearded seal mother gives birth on a small floating pan of ice over shallow water, somewhere between mid-March and May depending on the region. The pup weighs 30 to 40 kilograms at birth and is in the water within hours, which almost no other seal pup manages.
That is a deliberate strategy rather than an accident. The floe a pup was born on can break up, tip over, or drift somewhere useless, and polar bears patrol the ice hunting exactly these animals. A pup that can already swim has an escape route. Within a week it can dive to about 60 metres, and NOAA records that pups spend roughly half their time in the water by the age of a few days.
Nursing lasts only about 18 to 24 days. In that time the pup drinks around 8 litres of milk a day and gains about 3.3 kilograms daily, reaching roughly 100 kilograms by weaning. Then the mother mates again and leaves. The pup has had less than a month of parenting and works out the rest alone.
For most of the modern era the bearded seal sat in the lowest risk category, Least Concern. On 10 October 2025, at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, it was moved to Near Threatened. The hooded seal went from Vulnerable to Endangered in the same update, and the harp seal was also moved to Near Threatened.
The reason given was not hunting or pollution. Kit Kovacs, co-chair of the IUCN pinniped specialist group, pointed to breeding habitat deterioration caused by climate change. The Arctic is warming roughly four times faster than the global average, and bearded seals need drifting pack ice over shallow water at precisely the right time of year to give birth, nurse, moult and rest.
Nobody knows how many bearded seals there are. NOAA says plainly that no accurate figure exists but estimates more than 500,000. A 2016 aerial survey of the Chukchi Sea counted 147,421 animals, and a genetics-based study using harvested seals from 1998 to 2020 estimated about 409,000 across the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Those methods measure different things over different areas, so they cannot be added together. Near Threatened does not mean crisis today. It means the direction of travel is concerning enough that the lowest category no longer fits.
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