On Saturday, the Lithuanian Maritime Museum is holding a naming ceremony for 19 baby seals that will be given Samogitian names. The event will also include awarding the winners of the naming competition.
Nineteen baby seals are currently being treated at the museum’s Baltic Sea Animal Rehabilitation Centre, says Arūnas Grušas.
“All of them are getting better, 11 are already outdoors, feeding on their own – herring and gobies,” Grušas is quoted in a press release from the Lithuanian Maritime Museum.
He has been taking care of baby seals for over three decades.
“The last two seals arrived with bite wounds that have not fully healed yet, and they have also contracted chicken pox, which attacks the others too, but mostly these feable ones. We have given a lot of antibiotics to these animals, their immune system is very damaged. The healthier seals are recovering fast, they have already doubled their weight to 20–25 kg, and if they continue to grow at this rate, we will be able to release them at the end of July,” said Grušas.
Before being released back into nature, each seal is named. Grušas and his team used to come up with names themselves, usually after a place where they were found: Preila, Smiltynė, Naglis, Juodkrantė and so on. However, the names soon started repeating.
And so they decided to allow everyone to suggest the names to be given to the seals. Each year, the naming competition focuses on one ethnographic region of Lithuania, inviting people – not just from that region – to submit names in the corresponding dialect.
This year the focus is Samogitia, or Žemaitija. In all, 895 people submitted over one thousand names. The museum selected 30 that seemed most fitting to the character and look of the baby seals:
Aniuols, Barta, Blezdinga, Broknė, Ciongs, Čiopa, Čiūtė, Dabena, Dėcens, Drėgonts, Duovėna, Gembė, Griūšė, Kipis, Kontėns, Kresna, Krėžis, Kriupis, Lėžė, Mėgla, Mėslė, Ouga, Parpalis, Pliorpals, Pliuškė, Ripka, Sliduoks, Šmakals, Valiūks, Veizorius.
The Seal naming event will take place at the Lithuanian Maritime Museum’s Baltic Sea Animal Rehabilitation Centre (Smiltynės Street 2, Klaipėda) on Saturday at noon.
The Baltic grey seal (Halichoerus grypus macrorhychus) is a rare and endangered species, listed in the Red Books of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. These seals have lived in the Baltic Sea for 10,000 years.
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