 Ocean
Watch
Friday, February 15, 2002
Elephant seal came, saw,
charmed and flew away
A rescued elephant seal brought to
Barbers Point Coast Guard Station
on Jan. 17 showed wounds made by sharks.
Last week, I visited Kailua-Kona.
Not the place, the seal.
Kailua-Kona is the nickname of the elephant seal that
swam to the Big Island from North America several weeks ago. His arrival
here was remarkable because Kailua-Kona went where no elephant seal has
gone before: to a main Hawaiian island.
Elephant seals are rare in the Hawaiian Archipelago.
Only three have made it here before, and they all went to Midway (two in
the '70s, one in the '80s). So even though these seals are known to swim
long distances, going this far south is a record.
After getting a checkup and appearing on the evening
news, the year-old celebrity was flown by federal biologists to the Marine
Mammal Center in Marin County.
By good fortune, I had already planned a trip to that
area, and arranged to meet with Kailua-Kona and his keepers.
When I arrived, I was escorted to the seal's roomy
outdoor quarters, complete with a swimming pool, and found him doing what
seals are usually doing on land: sleeping. Our voices caused him to lift
his head and look around, but seeing only a bunch of humans, he promptly
went back to sleep.
The juvenile seal looked good. He's eating well, and
his small, raw shark bites have healed nicely into about a dozen puckered
scars.
The scars reminded me of a comment I heard from a local
television reporter when the seal was still here in Hawaii. The newscaster
admired the hardiness of the animal, commenting that we humans could never
survive so many shark bites.
But we could. The bites on Kailua-Kona came from cookie
cutter sharks, small parasitic fish that bite and run. These
foot-and-a-half-long sharks don't aim to kill. Instead, they nibble,
leaving their food sources alive to grow new flesh.
Fortunately, cookie cutter sharks don't bite humans
because they are deep, offshore creatures.
Surprisingly, elephant seals are also deep, offshore
creatures. Of all the seals and sea lions in the world, elephant seals
dive the deepest and stay down the longest. An adult male has been
documented diving to about 4,500 feet (nearly a mile) and staying
underwater for 80 minutes.
These astonishingly long, deep dives searching for
squid don't seem to tax the seals much. While foraging, they may spend
less than three minutes resting on the surface between dives.
As I watched Kailua-Kona sleeping peacefully in Marin,
I wondered why biologists didn't leave him in Hawaii. After all, he got
here on his own, and that's how native plants and animals get established.
National Marine Fisheries Service biologist and seal
authority Bud Antonelis gave two good reasons for sending Kailua-Kona home
so quickly.
First, the young visitor bore seal parasites not found
in Hawaii. Elephant seals have apparently adapted to living with these
creatures with little or no harm done. A new parasite, however, could
devastate the small, remaining population of our endangered Hawaiian monk
seals.
Another reason for flying the elephant seal home was
that if left here, he probably would have starved to death. Elephant seals
are not adapted to feeding in the tropics, and even if they were, our warm
waters contain far less food than the cold, nutrient-rich waters of the
north. Flying the animal home was humane.
Kailua-Kona is scheduled to be released back to the
wild today. Hopefully, he will grow to about 2 tons, charm a host of
females and father lots of robust offspring like himself.
The adventurous little seal is a credit to his species.
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