A rare arctic ribbon seal in Russia.

For those living near or on the waterfront, regular sightings of sea creatures are nothing out of the ordinary. But recently, a Seattle woman was surprised to find an Arctic ribbon seal on her dock.

While the ribbon seal lives mostly in the northern waters off Alaska and Russia, this one somehow ended up thousands of miles away, in Washington State.

Peter Boveng of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory’s Polar Ecosystems Program commented that the sighting was both “exciting” and “unusual.”

Because these particular seals typically avoid land and leave the sea for only a small fraction of the year, much of their lives in the open water are a mystery.

Due to disappearing ice in the arctic, there has been a great effort to have the ribbon seal added to the endangered species list – they typically leave the ocean only to give birth on the ice.

Reportedly, this is only the second seal to make it south of the Aleutian Islands. In 1962, a ribbon seal was found on a beach just 200 miles north of Los Angeles. It died one month later.

For this and many reasons, there organizations are now searching the waters for the seal, which has not been seen since its initial sighting “hanging out and sleeping” last week.

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Source: Yahoo News

Flickr Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Gallery