Antarctic fur seals are the smallest of the polar seals and live almost exclusively on the island of South Georgia. The latest assessment by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the global conservation authority, upgraded fur seal extinction threat from least concern to endangered. The last assessment was carried out in 2014.
Recent research found that Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella) populations have more than halved over the last 25 years, plummeting from nearly 2.2 million adult seals in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025.
That’s a huge population loss in just three generations, Jaume Forcada, who has been studying fur seals at the British Antarctic Survey for more than 20 years, wrote in a statement. “Unless we address the root causes of climate change, we risk losing even more,” he added.
The IUCN attributed the 50% population loss to reduced food availability: Warmer temperatures and shrinking sea ice caused by fossil fuel emissions led large schools of krill, the seal’s main prey, to move into deeper and colder waters.
Fur seals are also competing with large fishing vessels, harvesting krill mostly for use as feed in aquaculture. In October 2025, Norway proposed doubling the krill catch limit in the Southern Ocean.
Young seal pups under the age of 1 year are the most impacted by the habitat change; many are unable to survive to adulthood without sufficient food.
The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) was also listed as vulnerable in the IUCN’s April 9 announcement. An outbreak of the H5N1 avian influenza in 2023 killed an estimated 17,000 elephant seal pups on southern Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula, the species’ largest die-off ever recorded.
On the other side of the Earth, in the Arctic, temperatures are rising four times faster than the global average, and Arctic seals are also feeling the impacts of a changing climate. In October 2025, three more seal species were relisted, moving closer to extinction due to climate change and melting sea ice.
The hooded seal (Cystophora cristata), which lives in the Arctic region between Canada, Greenland and Norway, went from vulnerable to endangered.
Similarly, the bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus) and harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus), which both live across the Arctic region, were moved from least concern to near threatened.
“These assessments sound an alarm,” Kit Kovacs, co-chair of the IUCN Pinniped Specialist Group, wrote in a statement. “We are concerned about how environmental changes are affecting all ice-dependent species.”
The emperor penguin, one of Antarctica’s most iconic species, was also listed as endangered in the IUCN announcement, following ice losses that threaten the survival of baby chicks.
Banner image: Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella). Image courtesy of Kit Kovacs & Christian Lydersen/Norwegian Polar Institute.
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