08.06.26 - Juuju the seal cub

Thirty year-old John Josefsen from Paamiut had a surprise when he was sitting in his skiff South of Greenland’s capital Nuuk getting himself something to eat.

A seal head emerged from the ocean just a few metres from his boat and stared calmly at him. Instead of fleeing the seal actually came closer to him - which is very unusual behaviour for a seal. He managed to haul it aboard, and discovered that it was a ring seal cub.

“I named the seal, Juuju, which is sort of the way its bark sounds. It does actually sound like a puppy a lot of the time – except when it’s angry and then it hisses like a cat,” says John Josefsen. “When I was a child I remember that my aataa (Greenlandic for grandfather) often brought seal pups home with him that we used to look after during the summer before releasing them back into the sea.”

The seal cub Juuju is held by John Josefsen. Photo: GTE

John Josefsen is now carrying on his grandfather’s proud tradition; and he's been looking after Juuju for more than a week. Every day he lets the seal loose and feeds it Arctic Char: ”I feed Juju at sea so he can eat in his natural surroundings; and he’s has got used to coming to me when I call him during feeding,” says John Josefsen. “When I travel South, I take Juuju with me, and when I release him again I’ll do so in an area which is not visited by people. He belongs in his home: the sea.” 
 
Researcher Aqqalu Rosing-Asvid of the Mammals and Birds Department of Greenland’s Nature Institute will tag Juuju before John Josefsen releases him into the wild. Aqqalu has also been able to determine Juuju’s age. As he still has some long hairs on his hind flippers, he must be a little over a month old.

Ring seals leave their offspring to fend for themselves when they are a little over 14 days old. At that point the baby seal will have suckled so much milk from its mother that it can survive for almost two months without eating whilst it learns to catch its own food.