One big job
You've got to be careful
By Mary Adamski
when you're dealing with
a 225-pound baby
Star-BulletinAfter a rare human tussle, the only Hawaiian monk seal known to be born in the main Hawaiian islands this year was tagged by federal wildlife biologists on a remote Molokai beach last week.
The humans were delighted to discover that the 49-day-old pup is a female, offering a prospect for increase of her endangered species, which numbers less than 1,500.
Officially, the pup is designated Red Y-30, meaning the 30th monk seal tagged in the eight islands since the program began in 1988 with the aim of counting and tracking the animals.
But she is known affectionately as "Sequel" by the residents of Kalaupapa who have watched her from a distance since her May 8 birth on a deserted stretch of beach. Last year they watched the progress of her sister, dubbed "Kalaupapa."
The mother and 1-year-old seal are among five of the species seen frequently around the remote peninsula, said National Park Service wildlife biologist Rick Potts.
On Thursday, Potts held down the thrashing baby while National Marine Fisheries Service wildlife biologist Thea Johanos-Kam used a leather puncher to insert the red tags on her rear flippers.They estimated her weight at 225 pounds and slipped a tape measure around her slippery body to record her length -- 59 inches -- and chest circumference -- 48 inches.
But first, they waited nearly three hours for the baby to edge far enough out of the water, and for her to change her basking position from back to belly. Nudging her along was not an option, and Johanos-Kam missed the last plane out that day rather than interfere with nature's slow pace.
As they do in other populated places where a monk seal comes ashore, officials had stretched yellow tape in the tree line about 100 feet away to keep people at a distance. But perhaps more than anywhere else in the islands, the seals -- mother and daughters -- have been steadily exposed to humans. Day after day, people come by and hunker down behind the tapes to watch the basking animals.
That may be why, despite the indignity of the intimate encounter -- clocked by Park Service administrator Dean Alexander at two minutes and 59 seconds -- the baby didn't flee the scene when it ended and the humans retreated.
Potts said the pup was estimated at 15 pounds when she was born and about 200 pounds when she was weaned at 46 days old.
Meanwhile mama seal, who was about 500 pounds when she came ashore to give birth, was down to 250 pounds. She didn't eat for the 46 days of nursing at the shoreline and teaching the pup to swim.
She drove off two male seals with barks and muttered whenever they tried to approach her stretch of shore, said Julie Sigler, a nurse at Kalaupapa Hospital, whose home videos record the day-by-day life of Sequel. Sigler believes she witnessed a special interaction of maternal farewell nudging on the day the mother abandoned her weaned offspring, as is the nature of the creature.Most Hawaiian monk seals live around Midway and Kure atolls, French Frigate Shoals and other northwestern Hawaiian islands uninhabited by humans. Marine Fisheries Service biologists make annual expeditions to tag those animals, too, using a different color code for each island.
They have found that the animals are not gregarious, they don't collect in harems or congregate in large populations as other seal species do. The animals are at risk from predators, mainly tiger sharks, and from parasites and ciguatera poisoning. Biologists have relocated seals from one island to another to decrease the risk of death from their own kind when females are mobbed in an overpopulation of males, Potts said.
But man is the endangering species. Seals are caught in fishing nets or fatally entangled in other debris. In 1991, the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Council limited fishing in a protected species zone around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in an effort to keep monk seals from vanishing.
