There has been a lot going on in the Seal Center this summer! As you may have heard, the staff has increased from 3 staff members to 8, at least during the summer. Beside the manager Hrafnhildur Ýr and us (Sandra and Per Åke), we can now proudly present Karólína (reception), Sigurrós (tourism research), Benóný (reception and tourism research) and last but not least our two volunteers from Spain; Laila and Ester (seal ecology research).

In the beginning of the summer, Hrafnhildur, Per Åke and Sandra attended a conference in Abisko, north of Sweden. The conference was called “Tourism, People and Protected Areas in Polar Wildness” and we presented our project The Wild North there. At the conference we met a lot of new (and familiar) interesting people.

There is a lot of research going on at the moment! Biologists and sometimes also tourism researchers, often have to do most of their field work in the summer and we are no exception. At Vatnsnes peninsula, we have our two Spanish girls who are counting seals and collecting data about the behaviour of seals on seal watching sites. They are doing a great job and they have already collected a lot of new data for us to analyze.

In June and in the beginning of July, we tagged seals with radio tags, to be able to investigate the movements of seals in and out of the river mouths at Bjargós and Sigriðstaðaós. If you see a seal with an antenna, you should know that it is not an alien, only a tagged seal! You can read more about this project on the homepage soon.

 

Photo: A tagged seal with a radio tag on its head and a roto tag on its back flipper

Photo: Part of the seal tagging team: Garðar from Stórhóll, Halldór from Súluvellir, Ester (volunteer from Spain) and Sandra (project manager from the Seal Center). Laila (volunteer from Spain) and Olle Karlsson (a Swedish seal expert) also took part of the seal tagging process.

We are also investigating the number of tourists coming to Hvammstangi (paying visits to the Seal Museum) and their background. Last year, about 6 000 tourists visited the museum and 4 500 of them were foreigners. The figures for this year seem to be higher. The most frequent nationalities are German and French but there are also a lot of Swiss and Austrians. Our close neighbours (Scandinavians and Brits) are very few. The main reason for coming to Hvammstangi is said in the interviews to be seal watching.
If we figure that each tourists spends 1000 ISK per day, this means 6 million ISK as income from tourists for Havmmstangi. But probably they spend 10 000 ISK per person so 60 million is a more probable figure. That contributes to maintain the service standard of Hvammstangi

In August, Per Åke and Sandra will attend another conference in Latvia, where parts of our research will be presented. At the moment, we are preparing for that and making analyzes of the data we have collected during the last few years and so far this summer. We are looking forward to the conference! It is always inspiring to attend conferences, even though it also takes a lot of work to prepare for presentations.

All the best,
Sandra Granquist and Per Åke Nilsson

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