PHOTO COURTESY OF NOAA
A Hawaiian monk seal was captured yesterday morning at La Perouse Bay on Maui and is headed for Johnston Atoll.
Mischievous seal
too big to play niceThe monk seal will be moved
from Maui to Johnston Atoll
A playful Hawaiian monk seal that evaded capture for three days while he frolicked with swimmers was caught yesterday morning at La Perouse Bay on Maui and is headed for Johnston Atoll.
The seal's antics at Big Beach on Maui this week had included nipping several swimmers and grabbing one woman and trying to submerge her.
Though the people-friendly seal apparently just wants to play, it cannot continue because the seal is 300 pounds and growing, said Brad Ryon, a protected-resources manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service.
"This is his third strike," Ryon said yesterday.
When the seal, known as RM-34, first started interacting with swimmers in the Big Island's Kealakekua Bay last month, "we tried to move him within his island (to the less populated South Point), and that didn't work."
Within a week the seal was back at Kealakekua Bay, again playfully nipping and groping people in the water.
Wildlife officials again relocated the seal, this time to Kahoolawe. That seemed to be working until he turned up off South Maui beaches Tuesday, as frisky as ever.
Ryon said that because the 2 1/2-year-old seal grew up with a relatively small population of seals, he has not had enough modeling of seal-appropriate behavior.
So, he will be moved to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge at Johnston Atoll, where he is unlikely to encounter humans.
Johnston Atoll was chosen over the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where most Hawaiian monk seals live, because wildlife officials do not want to take the risk that RM-34 could have contracted a disease from land animals on the main Hawaiian Islands and pass it to the main population of seals.
