The seal-mother suckles her young ones for one and a half months to two months. The archpriest Avvakum and Nikolay Spafary, a Russian envoy in China (1675), were the first who informed about the presence of the seal in Lake Baikal. History of seal studies. One of those is the seals’ favourite food, the golomyanka, a pink, partly transparent fish which gives birth to live young. Lake Baikal in southern Siberia is home to 80,000 seals. The 25-million old lake has a maximum depth of 1,642 meters and is a living museum, boasting approximately 1,700 animal and plant species, out of which two thirds are endemic.

Lake Baikal is nothing short than a natural wonder.

Lake Baikal is also the largest body of fresh water in the world.

Seals live throughout Baikal but mostly in the north basin. Since ancient times the unique peculiar features of this animal have attracted the attention of researchers. Lake Baikal’s ecosystem is extremely diverse, and nearly 80% of the plant and animal species that live in and around the lake cannot be found anywhere else. Lake Baikal is a 395 mile long lake in eastern Siberia, bordering Mongolia. It contains about 20% of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. Third, flora and fauna of Lake Baikal are unique: more than 1000 local species of plants and animals can’t be found anywhere else. In our previous papers we provided evidence that the CDV similar to strain, identified in 1988, continued to circulate in Lake Baikal seals after 1988. The Russians do not began to… It turns out that the Baikal seal is peculiar amongst seals for its long life span, the maximum age of the female being 56, and of the male - 52 years. Geologists estimate that Lake Baikal formed somewhere 20-25 million years ago, during the Mesozoic. The Baikal seal is the only freshwater species of its kind and can stay under the surface for up to an hour and reach incredible depths of 1,000ft. In summer time the seals are dispersed all over the lake. In this lesson, we'll take a look at an inhabitant of the world's oldest lake: the Baikal seal. Lake Baikal It is the "pearl of Siberia", so named for its beauty and nature. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest true seals and the only exclusively freshwater pinniped species. The Baikal seal possesses enlarged eyes that enable it to find prey in water as deep and clear as that in Lake Baikal (Endo et al., 1998a, b, 1999).The skull of the Caspian seal possesses the same thin frontal bone and dorsoventrally developed zygomatic arch found in the Baikal seal that are required to accommodate the enlarged eyeball in the orbit (Endo et al., 2002). Baikal seals are the only seal species to live entirely in freshwater. It is the oldest existing freshwater lake on Earth (20 million-25 million years old), as well as the deepest continental body of water, having a maximum depth of 5,315 feet (1,620 meters). But not much more on that later.” Lake Baikal stretches across southern Siberia and it contains enough water to exceed all of the Great Lakes combined. They spend their days zooming through the water in pursuit of delicious fish, crowding onto rocks to … But not really! In addition, annual surveys of the lake's top pelagic predator, the Baikal seal, which ended in the early 1990s, should be renewed because of this animal's sensitivity to changes in ice cover and the potential effects on food-web structure.
Like the Caspian seal, it is related to the Arctic ringed seal. As shown on the map below, it is located in the south of central Siberia, in the Russian Federation, quite near of Mongolia and China. Usually Baikal seals are born at the end of winter and at the beginning of spring. It is the deepest, oldest and largest freshwater lake by volume, containing one fifth of the world’s fresh water.
The visibility in the water can reach up to 40 meters in fine weather. The virus epizootic which resulted in significant mortality of Siberian seals (Phoca sibirica) in Lake Baikal during 1987–1988 was caused by the canine distemper virus (CDV).