The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

by Diane Ackerman

  This horseshoe-shaped spill of islets and sand spits provides the last sanctuary of the Hawaiian monk seal, “a living fossil,” some have called it, a seal so ancient, rare, and shy that it seems almost mythic. For millennia, monk seals swarmed through the Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean. It was the first pinniped recorded by Aristotle, the first seal spotted by Columbus. Tame, shore-loving, and exploitable, monk seals soon were slaughtered in droves. We think of extinction as a horror locked in the mysterious sea chest of our past, something that happened long ago, not as a process going on right now. But the last recorded Caribbean monk seal was spotted in 1952. I was four years old, growing up in a small town in Illinois, playing in the plum orchard across from my house, and learning to count. I didn’t know that an animal that had survived for fourteen million years was at that moment becoming extinct, nor that I would one day lament its passing, and that most people would see a monk seal only if it was flattened in a textbook or stuffed in a museum.

  A few monk seals still inhabit the Mediterranean, but vanishingly few, and they’re rarely glimpsed. Not long ago, two researchers, traveling across Morocco to study them, died when their jeep hit a landmine. So many governments have divided up the habitat of the Mediterranean monk seal that organized research is not feasible. And, in any case, monk seals are rattled by human doings—motorboats, airplanes, fishing, tourists. The calm and soulful Mediterranean of Aristotle, where sirens sang lonely songs, has evolved into a carnival of racket, fun, and commerce. The only hope for the entire genus Monachus lies with the remaining Hawaiian monk seals, which have found a remote hiding place. Even these seals are vexed by problems.

  All the monk seal wants is to continue living in the ancient seas for which it’s designed. But those waters are gone now. Pollutants, plastics, and fishing lines ride the waves, and hominids stomp along the beaches or race across the reefs. Indeed, a Loran C satellite-navigation tower dominates one of the monk seal’s key pupping islands. Occasionally a pregnant monk seal does haul up onto a fashionable beach on one of the main Hawaiian islands. Ironically, although tourists may lie happily for hours, broiling in the sun, when they see a monk seal doing the same thing they assume it’s stranded or in trouble, and they chase it back into the ocean. That simple act—hazing it back to sea—may kill it and its young. Monk seals choose a beach carefully, judging terrain and shallow water. Frightened by humans, a seal will look for another pupping spot, one with fewer people, even if it means a less ideal landscape. A female monk seal needs a shallow crib for her young, right offshore, where she can protect and nurse it. Deep water close to shore invites sharks, the silent marauders of the reef, which relish seal pups. It’s not only callous or reckless people who are at fault. We have a tacit belief that life is motion, and so well-wishers sometimes love a beached seal to its doom.

  Suddenly Tern Island materializes beneath us. A long, sandy aircraft-carrier-shaped island, it was used by the U.S. Navy in 1942 as an outpost during the war in the Pacific. On final approach, the pilots put on white crash helmets, lest a wayward bird hit the windshield and shatter it. Turning, we line up with a broad coral runway, cut the engines, and begin the slow-motion fall of the landing, as great flocks of frigates, boobies, and terns burst like flak into the air all around us. As we touch down, a second barrage of birds flies up—brown noddies, this time, shearwaters, and plovers—and in a cyclone of birds we come to rest at last before a long barracks, outside of which a plaque reads: “Tern Island, French Frigate Shoals. Population 4.”

  The refuge manager and three women researchers come out to greet us and carry the boxes of food we have brought with us into the field station. A Π-shaped building with two long corridors leading away from a large public room and a kitchen, it once housed dozens of GIs. Now most of the small bedrooms stand empty. The open dining room and recreation area (complete with Ping-Pong table, pool table, library, and VCR), and the separate storage rooms and laundry rooms give it the feel of a college dorm. Four hefty refrigerators dominate the kitchen, and the walk-in pantries are loaded with enough food and drink for many months of isolation. Water is collected on the basketball court beside the building and then purified. A small, hot “dry room” protects the station’s medicines, as well as its word processor, Xerox machine, walkie-talkies, and other sensitive equipment. A generator powers the lights and appliances, but when someone needs to talk on the shortwave radio, lights must be turned off to save electricity.

  I’ve come to French Frigate Shoals with William Gilmartin, director of the Monk Seal Project, to tag this year’s pups and check the general health of the adults. William Curtsinger, a National Geographic photographer, has joined us. Gilmartin is a tall, thin, bearded man in his fifties, with thinning hair, enormous hands, and strong nose and forehead. Curtsinger is lightly built, blond, and forty-four, with a face lined by many years of working beneath sun and ocean. Gil’s tan-and-orange T-shirt says: “Hawaii—I’ve found a home.” Bill wears a T-shirt also, light blue, and without a legend. For a week, we’ll be a team.

  On expeditions, it’s always wise to eat whenever one gets a chance, regardless of time or hunger. So when we find a pot of chili and rice in the kitchen, we sit down to a heavy breakfast. Then I drop my kit in my room, number 13, on the east side of the building. Bill and Gil have chosen rooms on the west side, with windows opening onto a courtyard full of brown noddies and wedge-footed shearwaters (“wedgies”). My windows, locked in the open position, face the beach and ocean. If it weren’t for the angle of the guano-speckled panes, a fairy tern, debating with its reflection in the glass, would be able to fly right in and land on the wooden desk. A conga line of tiny ants wends across a dust-veiled mirror sitting atop a chest of drawers. Opening a warped drawer, I find more ants and quickly realize that they are everywhere; a handful even meander across the white desert of my bed. Like the geckos patrolling the wastecans in the dining room, the ants are harmless, and I don’t mind setting my clothes among them. An ancient instinct makes me jump when a bug or reptile scurries unexpectedly near my hand. But I like being reminded what frail outposts we construct in the wilderness, as if plaster, metal, and linoleum really could keep nature away from us, even temporarily. Nature always waits awhile, then sends in its platoon of ant, gecko, bird, or beetle—the where-you-least-expect-to-find-them brigade, specialists in remote places. So I don’t mind ants in my bed here, any more than I minded, only a week ago, finding a garter snake basking on a potted chrysanthemum at my living-room window in upstate New York. It’s nice to be reminded occasionally that borders are arbitrary, and that absolute categories such as “outside” and “inside” can just as easily reverse.

  Gil appears at my door, dressed in black spandex biking shorts, a ripped T-shirt, and a peaked hat. In one hand he is carrying a small notebook, in the other a large white plastic bucket marked TAGGING. “Ready?” he asks. “Don’t forget the sunscreen.” Reflecting off the coral sand, the noon sun can be ferocious. Only mad dogs and field biologists go out in it.

  Bill, Gil, and I rendezvous at the boat dock, where we use an electric crane to lower an orange Boston whaler into the water. Our first stop today will be East Island, a long, slipper-shaped island six miles southeast of Tern, which once held a U.S. Coast Guard station. The ocean heaves and rolls. Timing it just right, we jump into the lurching boat as if onto a merry-go-round in motion, put on life vests, test our two shortwave radios, and then set out. After a bone-jarring, wave-leaping ride of forty minutes, we see a bright doily on the horizon, staying low but sliding closer. Composed entirely of coarse coral sand and pulverized shells, East Island is only about two thousand feet long and four hundred feet wide, and it doesn’t rise more than eight or ten feet above sea level. Actually, it looks more like a callus or a kneepad than an island, and a brisk storm could dash waves right over it. Masked boobies, sooty terns, and Laysan albatrosses fly out to greet us as we pick our way among the coral heads, at last settling for a spot on the leeward side of the island.
Bill fixes the stern anchor in the ocean; I slide over the bow with a second anchor and run up the beach to plant its steel claws in a small dune. Gil radios home that we’ve arrived at East. When we leave, he’ll radio again. This routine gives the field station only a small parenthesis of information, a mental bracket by which to find us. But if something should happen to our boat, at least they would know where to begin searching.

  Wading through the warm water, we carry buckets and gear on our heads like jungle porters and leave them in a heap on the shore. The sun feels hot as a branding iron on any exposed skin. There is no shade, and the irregular coral sand, like millions of small perfectly white teeth, reflects all of the sun’s fury. Gil says researchers sometimes play the idle-hour game of trying to find their initials in the coral fragments. Stooping, I cup a handful and let thousands of tiny ciphers sift through my open fingers. Because they look meaningful, my mind struggles to arrange them. It is just a reflex. Our senses search for patterns, and when we find them it’s hard to accept chance as the culprit. But only the random chiseling of water on coral has produced this textured sand of shocking beauty. For a moment, I can almost feel the tugging as my mind probes the coral for meaning, lets go, probes again, lets go.

  Beside me, and all over the island, lie clumps of debris from the North Pacific—empty bottles, old toothbrushes, combs, a plastic baseball bat, thongs, and hundreds of handblown glass fishing floats in round or rolling-pin shapes. Crazed by sunlight, the floats sparkle in an array of trembling blues and greens. They’re often signed in Japanese, and some clouded ones shine like crystal balls. At first glance, the island seems to have been bombed. But the shallow craters are mainly the caved-in pits of the green turtle, or burrow nests made by wedge-footed shearwaters.

  A tall Loran C tower stands at one end of the island, and I follow its hour-hand shadow down to the beach, where it falls across the flanks of a large monk seal. Browner than I imagined, and molting in patches, the seal looks a little like an old horsehair couch someone has left by the curb. Its belly glows a pale chamois-color and its chest is green from algae. Lying placidly with its muzzle half-buried in sand, the seal snoozes as incoming waves swirl around its face, sudsing its whiskers. I think of drowning. Breathing is so regular and automatic for us, our air hunger so urgent, that we forget that other animals need air on different schedules. After the seal inhales and exhales three times in a row, its chest stays motionless for ten minutes. Then, lifting its heavy head, it sneezes with a wild twisting of the neck and settles back on the sand with a loud harrumph. Monk seals suffer from nose mites, which give them terrible sinus problems. Although they can use their webbed front flippers to scratch at the face and mouth, they can’t reach the mites very well. So they sneeze often, loudly, and with full sinuses.

  Two pups appear in the surf and start playing rough-and-tumble. I assume that such play teaches them skills needed for mating or fighting. Gil isn’t sure. Little is known about the courtship rituals of monk seals. In fact, mating has been observed only twice—once in 1978 and once in 1982. Both events happened in deep water, and one of the accounts is iffy.

  Strolling past a low dune, we come upon six large seals lying parallel in the sand. Their sheer size is surprising.

  “Look at all those monks holding down the beach!” I whisper excitedly.

  Bill laughs. “You think the island is going to levitate?”

  Now a smaller seal, sleeping in the middle of the island, takes a few breaths, wakes up, and steam-shovels its way closer to the water, digging a long trench as it goes. Because they feed at night, monk seals bask in the blistering heat of the day, but they do like to dig down to a cool, damp layer of sand. In many places we find “tractor paths” left by monk seals that have dragged themselves to the water. If the treadmarks lie close together, the path was probably left by a large green sea turtle, also endangered. Almost 90 percent of all the remaining green sea turtles (the “green” refers to their fat, which has a green tint) nest on French Frigate Shoals. Seal flippers don’t make contact with the sand as often as turtle flippers do, so the tracks look just a little different.

  Gil bends his knees, rounds his shoulders, and sneaks up closer to the sleeping monk seals, checking to see if any are pups in need of flipper tags. The information researchers glean from tagging helps to chart the life cycles and movements of the animals and the progress of the rehabilitation program. Turning back toward me, he points to a small dark seal right at the end of the row. Monk seals molt each year, and for a while their new fur looks slate-black; this will most likely be a pup that’s gone through its first molt. Opening the white tagging bucket, I remove a tool for punching holes in leather belts, two fraying kneepads, paper and pencil, a tape measure, and two yellow plastic flipper tags. The color tells which year the pup was tagged, the number code stands for French Frigate Shoals. Holes drilled in the tag also signify the year, so that even if the paint is washed away, the tag will still be readable. An open jaw about an inch long, each tag has a small knob at one end. It’s a simple but ingenious design. I study it to see which end is up, which part goes in first, how the next part must follow. Holding a tag in the air, I rehearse the best wrist action for forcing the knob through the punched hole and tugging the device into place. Can I grip the tag with both hands to pull it through if necessary? I can. I slide on the kneepads and tie a blue sarong around my waist; the coral sand would grate my skin raw in no time. Then I hang the right flipper tag on the right side of my waistband, the left flipper tag on the left side. When the action starts, there won’t be much time for thinking. Coiling up the tape measure, I tuck it under the legband of my bathing suit, leaving a few centimeters dangling so I can grab it fast.

  Okay, I nod to Gil, and creep up behind him. Stealthy and alert, he hunkers down like a predator and sneaks right up behind the seal, climbs decisively onto its back, and grips its cheeks in both hands. Waking with a loud, gargling baah!, the seal begins rolling and squirming as I rush in, fall to my knees behind its tail, and try to catch the twin flippers flailing around in such confusion that it’s hard to tell left from right. I grab one out of midair and press it flat on the sand while the other smacks my face. Sliding the punch along the webbing between the first and second digit, I find a good spot and press hard; nothing happens. The seal struggles and complains. Then, leaning all my weight into my hands, I push again and this time hear the click of metal on metal and know the punch has gone through. I remove it. The seal smacks me full across the face with its flipper, raking sand and blood from my forehead down to my mouth. Quickly, I grab the left flipper, press it flat on the sand to get my bearings, find the inside digit’s webbing, slide the punch in about an inch and a half, and press again with my full body weight, straining from the effort. At last, metal clicks against metal. If this seal were part of the just-started DNA study, I’d be saving the plug of skin for genetic analysis.

  “How ya doin’?” Gil calls from in front. Straddling the seal’s back, he’s not actually sitting on it but corralling it with his long legs, pinning its front flippers with his knees. Gripping its chins, he holds its sharp teeth away from him, which also keeps the seal oriented belly-down.

  “At the tags,” I call back, just as both flippers sail up and crack me under the chin, then slap me full-face from left to right, which knocks me back off my knees. I crawl into place again, amazed by the sucker-punch of the flippers. Each has five digits and can open to a foot wide or close up tight as a baseball bat. Both are driven by a single powerful muscle at the base of the tail, a muscle thick as a human arm. Now the flippers clap and roll like someone packing a snowball, and it’s hard to tell which is which. I grab one, flatten it on the sand, confirm that it’s the right-hand flipper, pull the tag from my right side, push its knob through the punched hole, and drag the tiny surfboard-shaped hinge after it. While I angle the tag so that it locks, the flipper dances in the air. At last I force the tag into place and make sure it’s secure.

  �
�One done!” I call to Gil. Sweat has begun to pour down my face, carrying sand and blood with it. The wet fur smells chalky-sweet. The seal complains in a loud, steady basso gargle as I pull the remaining tag from my waistband and start on the second flipper. Only minutes are passing, but they feel long and exhausting.

  “Two done!” I call to Gil. Yanking the tape measure free, I slide one end under Gil’s rump and into his right hand so that he can pull it to the tip of the nose; I pull the other end to the tip of the tail.

  “One thirty-five,” I call. He repeats the number. Then I take the tape measure and move to the right side of the seal, which eyes me warily. What big black eyes and long stiff whiskers. It has a cleft in its nose like a cat or a llama, and a soft cream-colored overbite. Baaah! Its resonant gargle seems to come from a great distance and by way of an echo chamber.

  “Under the flippers!” Gil urges.

  Watching out for the teeth, I slide the tape measure under the seal’s chin, under the chest, and over the back just behind the flippers.

  “One-oh-nine-point-five.”

  “That’s it,” Gil says, climbing off. The seal rolls onto one side, facing us, and paws the air with a flipper. As it does, we see four tiny nipples halfway down its fawn-colored belly, and a vaginal slit right under the tail.

  Female. A precious pup. A grave threat to monk seals is how few females remain—too few for the species to flourish. This imbalance has so upset the workings of nature that males are resorting to a bizarre and ruinous behavior. On two of the main breeding islands, where the number of females is unusually low, a grisly phenomenon called mobbing takes place. As many as twenty males will attack and try to mate with one female. This may take several hours, during which time they gore the female’s back, slashing the skin off, ripping the blubber right down to the muscle, in some cases even exposing the spinal column. Savaged, the female dies either from her injuries or from shark attack.