I found this article on Popular Science and wanted to figure out its validity. The article is about how in the last 10 years, the seal population has been rapidly increasing to the point where its harming flora which is getting trampled. The seal population has recovered from hunters and is expanding down the Arctic Penninsula. They also discuss solutions to this problem like whether or not human intervention will have a negative impact on both the seals and plants.

This is the article I found and the original one

Saving fur seals may doom Antarctica’s at-risk plants | Popular Science (popsci.com)

What to Do When the Recovery of One Species Puts Another at Risk?

The first thing I did was went on SNOPES.com and Media Smarts custom search to see if they had anything relating to the article. I used keywords like ‘seals killing plants’ yet no results came up. This might be because the article is very recent.

The next thing I did was search up ‘Seals killing plants fake”. Once again, I couldn’t find any results pertaining to the article.

I decided to follow the links within the article and found that it was originally published on the Hakai Magazine. The Hakai Magazine publishes articles pertaining to science and has been around since 2015. I found their account on YouTube and it wasn’t verified. I did the same for twitter, but it was verified.

While looking through the original article published by Hakai Magazine I was able to find the link to the actual report of Seals damaging flora due to overpopulation and an expansion of natural habitat.

Within the report, there were links to 140+ references including ones to museums and scientists.

The next step I took was search the website (Hakai Magazine) on Wikipedia to see if there’s results. I found a description similar to what I found online.

After that, I googled the article and went to the news tab to see if others are reporting on the same topic and if they have varying views. I wasn’t able to find any other articles relating to ‘Seals killing plants due to overpopulation’.

I did the same search on Bit.ly/science-search to see if there’s articles there. Once again, I didn’t find any.

I would say this article is trustworthy for multiple reasons. One of which being that the website that originally posted this article writes about science. They were also able to give a link to the specific report done on seal overpopulation and the effects on fragile plants. This report also had links from doctors, and museums. Hakai Magazine, was also verified on twitter which verifies that there an actual News website (this does not verify their credibility though). I would say there is enough information to prove that this article is real.