Phocinae (known colloquially as "Northern seals") is a subfamily of Phocidae whose distribution is found in the seas surrounding the

Holarctic The Holarctic realm is a biogeographic realm that comprises the majority of habitats found throughout the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It corresponds to the floristic Boreal Kingdom. It includes both the Nearctic zoogeographical reg ...

, with the

Baikal seal The Baikal seal (''Pusa sibirica''), also known as Lake Baikal seal or Baikal nerpa (), is a species of earless seal endemic to Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest earless/true seals, and the only exclusively ...

(''Pusa sibirica'') being the world's only

freshwater Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids. The term excludes seawater and brackish water, but it does include non-salty mi ...

species of

pinniped Pinnipeds (pronounced ), commonly known as seals, are a widely range (biology), distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals. They comprise the extant taxon, extant families Odobenidae (whose onl ...

. What distinguishes them from other phocid seals is the presence of well-developed claws on their front and back flippers. The Phocinae is divided into three extant

tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide use of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. The definition is contested, in part due to conflict ...

s: Erignathini (represented by the sole extant

bearded seal The bearded seal (''Erignathus barbatus''), also called the square flipper seal, is a medium-sized pinniped that is found in and near to the Arctic Ocean. It gets its Genus, generic name from two Greek language, Greek words (''eri'' and ''gnathos ...

''Erignathus barbatus''), Cystophorini (another extant monotypic tribe represented by

hooded seal The hooded seal or bladdernose seal (''Cystophora cristata'') is a large phocid found only in the central and western North Atlantic, ranging from Svalbard in the east to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the west. The seals are typically silver-grey ...

''Cystophora cristata''), and Phocini (represented by the rest of the other surviving species in the subfamily). Members of both Erignathini and Cystophorini have 34 chromosomes, while species in the tribe Phocini have 32 chromosomes. Below is a composite phylogeny of the phocine genera after Berta & Churchill (2012), Dewaele et al. (2018), and Koretsky & Rahmat (2013):

References

Pinnipeds Taxa named by John Edward Gray Mammal subfamilies {{carnivora-stub