by Carl Safina
“So you know these animals individually by marks and scars?”
“Mmm-hmm. A lot of adults don’t have tags because they’re older than our program—twenty or more years old. So for them I use scars. But I know basically all the animals by body marks. This one’s seven years old.”
Everyone suits up, putting on their white disposable overalls and disinfected boots. Socks go into boots with a little slosh of bleach solution so feet, too, become disinfected. Everyone wears dust masks. Mitch has a pair of goggles. Everyone wears white gloves. Melissa wears rubber examination gloves and pulls out an orange box with sampling and surgical equipment.
We walk slowly through the bird-nesting area, out to the berm. Everybody looks to Mitch for cues. Mitch signals Forward. The sounds of the breeze, the birds, and the waves help mask our approach. A low-flying albatross zooms by.
Mitch, Mary, and Jason move to within about fifteen feet of the pungent-smelling seal, then halt. The animal is lying facing the lagoon. A brief powwow ensues, with Mitch indicating by hand movements that he would like Jason and Mary to get between the water and the seal, then come toward it. But before they get into position the seal wakes fully, rears its head, and opens its mouth in threat. Distracted at first by Mary and Jason, the seal suddenly realizes Mitch is coming up quickly behind, and starts hurriedly humping seaward.
As Mitch moves in with the net, the seal rears its head again, opens its mouth, and bellows. It swerves around and makes a lunge, forcing Mitch to nimbly swing his legs away. The seal continues fleeing. Mitch keeps after him. With unexpected agility, the seal rears up surprisingly high, almost jumping into the air—moving much faster than I thought it could. Mitch tries to toss the hoop around it, but the seal deflects by biting the net’s rim. Mitch finally gets the hoop most of the way over the seal’s head. The seal is struggling, turning onto its back and trying to bite. Mitch skillfully manages to keep his hands safe. As soon as the seal turns onto its belly to try to escape, Mitch pulls the hoop fully around its head and draws the net down along the seal’s body. Essentially bagged, the seal continues trying to bite, lunging right and left. Jason leaps aside. Pulling the net up snug, Mitch jumps onto the seal’s shoulders, straddling it with his legs. While the seal is still thrashing, Jason and Mary pile on its back. They have it pinned down with the net over its head. The seal snorts and struggles again, waving its head back and forth. Then it settles resignedly.
Melissa comes in behind. She applies Betadine, then alcohol to the animal’s rump, soaking the liquids into its dense fur. Then, very carefully, Melissa palpates the seal’s hindquarters. She’s feeling along the backbones, below where the nerves split (to avoid hitting a nerve), so she can find the right place to deliver an injection to a sinus beneath the vertebrae. She chooses her spot, then inserts and injects, announcing “Valium in, needle out.” In half a minute, the animal goes calm, remaining awake. It’s not sedated exactly—just no longer worried about us.
Mary goes down to the shoreline for some water. She pours the cooling liquid over the seal’s head and pugged face. The water washes some sand off its high forehead. It blinks its big dark eves.
Next, Melissa reaches for a four-inch needle. Mary affixes a flexible tube to a syringe. Melissa deftly palpates along the lower back again, chooses her place, and inserts half the needle into the seal. She is not satisfied with the flow of blood, and shakes her head. She discards the first needle, then palpates the animal’s hips again with her thumb and index finger. She makes another plunge, and the drawing needle hits a good spot. Satisfied this time, she pushes the needle all the way in, then pulls it up just a bit. The seal squirms to the left and gives a loud sneezy bellow. Melissa affixes the needle to the flexible tube connected to the syringe. Mary pulls up on the plunger, and scarlet blood suddenly begins filling the syringe. She takes two 30 cc blood samples. Mary separates the samples into six tubes and two small bottles for different later analyses. There is virtually no talking, only acknowledgment of moving through each procedure.
All this while, the sleek seal lies calmly. He’s awake, occasionally moving his head side to side, remaining quiet. We, too, remain quiet. The seal has become so sedated that no one is holding it down, although Mitch is standing by. The seal is breathing evenly. Jason, with a glance, silently inquires of Mitch whether the animal is doing well. Mitch gives the O.K. sign.
Melissa changes her examination gloves again. She applies more disinfectant. By now Melissa’s and Mary’s white overalls are stained with Betadine. Mary stows the syringe and hands Melissa a small scalpel. Melissa palpates the skin and softly says, “Cutting.” She makes a very small incision. Mary takes the scalpel and hands Melissa a biopsy probe, essentially a large hollow needle. As she plunges the probe in about an inch with a turning motion, the seal twists its body to the left. I wince. Mitch grips the back of its neck. Melissa pulls out the probe. A trickle of blood comes to the surface. With tweezers Mary has handed her, Melissa pulls from the instrument a small cylindrical piece of blubber that is the biopsy sample. She drops it into a small vial held by Mary. Melissa makes a second incision for a second biopsy sample; the first is for fatty-acid study of dietary components, the other for toxic-chemical analysis. She plunges the corer in. The animal responds identically, curling its body toward the side that Melissa is on, giving a bubbly snort. Jason pinches the biopsy wounds closed and, amazingly, they almost immediately stop bleeding and stick shut.
Another sleek, water-darkened seal comes ashore only about twenty yards away, looking like a pile of coal against the coral powder. These seals don’t use their flippers on land, so it inchworms its body up the beach. Not quite a fish out of water, it makes itself comfortable, resting its head on the shore’s soft shoulder, closing its eyes to peaceful slits. It snorts a long, wet snort: a seal of approval. Its color will lighten to dull yellow-brown as it dries in the sleepy squint of the sun. These seals’ lives look lazy and peaceful in this open turquoise cathedral, but their rest is well earned. You see them lying on the beach, gliding in the warm shallows, seemingly living a life of leisure. But for a Monk Seal, real life happens outside the reef, out in the ocean, often out of sight of land. Foraging dives often take them down two hundred feet or more on the atoll slopes. A Monk Seal may forage at sea for two or three weeks, then come ashore to rest for just a few days. But some go much deeper, up to fifteen hundred feet, foraging in darkness, in cold water under intense pressure—a world away from the sunlit beaches. Their imperiled numbers attest to their difficulties, their scars to the dangers. Surviving is a matter of hard work, and dying a matter of hard luck.
Melissa changes her gloves again. Next, she raises our animal’s stubby tail, inserting a swab into its anus. Mary holds open a jar to receive the tip of the swab, snips off its stem, then screws the jar cap closed. They repeat the process. Next Melissa puts some K-Y Jelly on a longer probe with a loop on the end and inserts it rather far into the anus. This is for parasites. She turns it several times and removes her sample. After one swabbing for viruses, one for salmonella, and another with the looped probe for parasites, they insert a thermometer. The seal sneezes. This animal’s internal temperature is 99.6° Fahrenheit.
Melissa brushes more disinfectant onto the animal near its left hip and injects two tiny, coded-wire tags. If it loses its external cattle tags, its identity can be ascertained by merely waving a special wand near its hindquarters.
Mary and Melissa take all the equipment and back away about twenty-five feet. Jason and Mitch get ready and then pull the net away from the seal’s head. It turns, flaring its nostrils, looking at us wide-eyed. Soon the sedative will wear off and it can go back to a natural slumber.
We retreat through the bird-nesting area. Gloves and suits are traded for new ones. Boots and net get sterilized again in a big tub of bleach. Everyone relaxes for a moment. Even when all goes well, everyone feels the strain of mixed feelings about working invasively and forcibly on an animal.
A little fa
rther down the beach, a plump young seal is tossing around a plastic soap bottle drifted in from the farther side of our small world. It’s a newly weaned pup born earlier this year. About fifty yards past it lies another seal that Mitch says is a yearling. Surprised, I say the yearling looks smaller than the new weaner. Mitch says that the yearlings are smaller. “They start out fatter when they wean, and lose a lot of weight in their first year while trying to survive on their own.”
As we approach the weaner, it opens its mouth wide and croaks a warning. Mitch confidently takes hold around the neck and straddles it.
It’s a female—a precious gift from out of the future. The team repeats all the blood work and swabbing, but does no biopsy for this youngster. It does, however, get ID tags. Melissa takes a hole puncher designed for leather and punctures one rear flipper. There is a snapping sound of metal meeting metal. The animal jerks when she does that. It is clearly not pleased; body piercing is not yet in vogue among Monk Seals. Mitch remains straddling the animal, holding its head the entire time. Melissa punches the other flipper. Mary picks up the numbered yellow plastic tags designed for the ears of cattle. These are numbered YI99. Melissa has a hard time pushing the second tag through the flipper, and the animal bellows. The problem with the tag is conveyed in whispers. Finally it goes in. They measure the seal’s length with the calipers, and girth around its chest with a tape. Then we’re done for the morning. The team is two seals closer to the fifty animals it needs to sample.
On the bright beach, a black newborn seal is actively nursing, enjoying its first taste of oral gratification. Its mother, sleeping placidly on her side, is plump with bodily reserves, like a big vat of milk and honey. Mitch says of the mother, “She’s a fatty, in really good condition.”
Another pup loafs nearby. It looks quite healthy but is alone. Mitch says that’s a classic example of a pup that’s been weaned too soon.
I ask, “How do you know it’s been weaned?”
He says, “There’s no mother around.”
I say, “Does that mean the pup is doomed?”
He hesitates for a second, and then says, “Probably. There’s a possibility that it’ll go and bug the hell out of another female, possibly even kick off a younger pup and then suckle. But probably it’s doomed.”
The name Monk Seal derives partly from the animal’s relatively solitary habits. So, unlike densely breeding seals and seabirds that have evolved the ability to recognize their own young in crowds, Monk Seals aren’t very good at identifying their own offspring. Consequently, pups sometimes get mixed up. Lost pups sometimes get adopted.
But even adoption is not a ticket to survival. Mother’s milk translates fat into time—time for the pup to learn. A normally weaned pup can be so fat it doesn’t need to eat much for two months, while it is learning how to forage. This has to happen on the right schedule. Pups are born at around thirty pounds. Normally they get nursed for five to six weeks. In those few weeks, they grow to about two hundred pounds. (The mother loses all that weight—and more—and doesn’t eat during that time.) At that point, the mother merely leaves, forcing the pup to independence.
Adopted pups have a fighting chance, but only if their timing is lucky. Here’s the calculation: You’ve got to be nursed for at least a month to have any chance of survival. A mother’s milk lasts six weeks, maximum. A mother with, say, a five-week-old pup of her own has only a week’s worth of milk left. So if she adopts a one-week-old pup, the adopted pup will get only two weeks’ milk total (one week from its real mother and one from its adopted mother)—thus dooming it. And sometimes, if an orphan is adopted, the adopting mother may lose her own offspring in the exchange—another route to doom.
AS WE’RE WALKING OUT, Mitch notices that a young seal that came ashore while we were working has a plastic packing strap stuck around its body, just past its flippers. That’s potentially lethal, because it could cut through the skin and flesh as the seal grows. As Mitch pulls a pair of pruning shears with two-foot handles from our cart, he says, “We see maybe one or two entangled seals each year here. But this one had gotten another packing strap stuck on it a few years ago. So that’s odd. There was another tangled one the other day, with a loop of rope and some gill net on him.”
Monk Seals like to get close to anything lying on the beach, such as logs. This may be one way they get tangled. Indeed, this one was lying snug against a big heap of hawser rope that had been somehow lost or discarded by a ship.
We stay behind, watching from about twenty yards away. Through binoculars I see three big stripes down the seal’s flank: probably a Tiger Shark bite, long healed over. Slumber in a world of deadly hazards.
Mitch sneaks up. Just as he’s almost there, the seal wakes and rears. In one concentrated expert motion, Mitch deftly jams the shears under the strap, presses them closed, and twists. The strap pops off. Mitch backs away from the seal. It immediately lies down again.
Jason, who has worked a lot on very active fur seals, remarks with surprise, “These Monk Seals all seemed drugged. That seal is back dozing already!”
Mitch adds that seals that have been handled before do less struggling. “Sometimes they just look at you as if to say, ‘Well, O.K.—whatever.’”
Melissa says, “Regardless of anything else—at least we know we did some good for that seal today.”
Mitch says, “It was a good morning. Except I really don’t like jumping on seals. I’m getting tired of it. You spend so much time trying not to disturb them. Then you go and scare the shit out of them. We tell other people to not even look at them, and yet now we’re going around poking them, doing all this disturbance.”
Mitch scratches a line in the sand with his toe and adds, “I often wonder if it’s really justified. The seal doesn’t care what agency you work for, or whether you’re a tourist or a scientist, if you happen to be sitting on it. But the bottom line I keep coming down to is—y’know—as long as human factors affect their numbers, I suppose it’s important for us to remain involved trying to preserve them. We know that they’ve persisted here for fifteen million years. But in the last human generation or two they’ve declined so much they could easily become extinct within a short time.”
Mitch gazes out past the beach to the lagoon, then continues, “This study is a hundred and eighty degrees different from our usual approach. It’s not our normal work. We try never to handle Monk Seals. We view each one as sacred. The only reason we’re handling them again is the possibility of morbillivirus. Because morbillivirus has devastated other marine-mammal populations, we have to take it very seriously. Still, I have mixed feelings about what we’re doing. I’m glad this season will be the last time we handle these animals for a while.”
Jason, too, views his endangered-species work with perspective. “You feel confident that you can do all the tasks. Yet in the larger picture you wonder whether all the skills we can bring to bear are really enough to get these Monk Seal populations into recovery mode. Most of the stuff that we do—who knows if you’re having a positive effect. You hope—you hope—it’s at least not harmful. You hope that by learning more you’ll be able to help the population in the long run. But certainly it’s pretty intangible. In Alaska we disentangled hundreds of seals that had netting around their necks. When you cut a piece of net off a seal, or pull some netting off the reef, you know that you’re actually helping individual animals. That’s one of the few times you can say that with certainty. But still you’re not sure what difference it makes to the population as a whole. You always have to have some humility. You always have to confront the possibility that if the population does go up, maybe it’s because you’re lucky.”
Using surgical suits, masks, and gloves and carefully washing nets and boots in between each seal minimizes any possibility that the work will add to the animals’ troubles. Most everyone has a true affection and a deep commitment to the animals and the work. I don’t know a field biologist who isn’t concerned about the effect they may b
e having on the animal they’re studying. But neither do I know a field biologist—including me—who has not occasionally shaken his head with disappointment and self-anger at an egg accidentally broken or an animal accidentally hurt. Few researchers take casualties lightly. Particularly among the new generation. Everyone constantly asks: “Is there a better way we could be working?” Techniques continue to improve. It feels good to be among those people, because their dedication is genuine. Ultimately, the work is intended to draw out what the animals cannot tell us. To give words to the wordless, and voice to the voiceless, so that we can try to reach the ones among us who so far have been beyond words.
We walk back through the bird colony, and several albatrosses rise to their feet, clacking at us.
APPROACHING THE BARRACKS, we notice that a seal has hauled itself onto the basketball court. It came in through a low break in the fence. There aren’t too many places where an endangered seal is likely to show up on the hoop court, but here in Wonderland you never can predict what the day might deliver. In a court of law the endangered animal has status. On this court of basketball a seal cannot appeal. Mitch fears it might be unable to find its way back out. He goes to talk it into leaving. He must shepherd it back to the same fence break. It goes to the brink, then snorts, looks back balefully, and rears up at him. It will make its determined stand right here. Mitch presses. It harks; it will not move. He presses more, using seal psychology: “Too far away and they ignore you, too close and they’ll turn to face you.” The seal gives up its occupation and humps back through the fence break.
We arrive at the barracks’ back entrance. About fifty noddies flush from their nesting bushes as we round the corner to the lab door. Though they return almost immediately, Melissa says, “Ooh, I hate to bother those birds.” To a little Fairy Tern chick resting on a concrete window ledge, Melissa calls, “Hi, little chickie.”
