KP2, on the other hand, barreled through the gate wanting to investigate every nook and cranny of the marine lab following his isolation. Since his arrival in Santa Cruz, he had listened to the calls, screeches, squeaks, laughs, and whistles that were the pulse of the lab. Finally, he was able to connect faces to the sounds.
The most vocal and certainly the loudest residents sat on a large outdoor wooden perch across the compound. A collection of ragtag orphaned parrots looked down their beaks at the newest resident humping his way toward them. Most days they whittled away at their perches, sunned themselves, and literally danced for human attention. KP2’s inchworming progress was something new. Wiki, a large, faded pink Moluccan cockatoo, watched with a sideways turn of his head. He ruled the flock that included Junior, an umbrella cockatoo, and Mary, a petite sulfur-crested cockatoo that incessantly repeated “Mary, Mary, Mary . . .” in a hoarse chant. The three birds as well as a handful of smaller parakeets had been deposited on my lab’s doorstep by owners that could no longer handle them. Some of the birds bit, one had developed the nervous habit of pulling out its own feathers, and all were neurotic in their own charming ways.
The birds had a vocal repertoire that went well beyond the requisite “hello.” Wiki tried a low catcall whistle on KP2 to no response. Junior followed with a series of bird chuckles. He was adept at mimicking the laughing styles of the people working at the lab. The bird had Heather’s giggle, Andy’s chortle, Amber’s titter, and Maria’s hearty guffaw down with such disarming accuracy that we were often left looking for the person following his impersonation.
Junior was also partial to women, bobbing and dancing for females who walked by in a mesmerizing display of head feathers after he laughed seductively. Men he just bit. He quickly grew bored with the fumbling seal and went back to cruising for women with his displays.
In the large pool next to the birds swam the two quietest but biggest personalities of the lab, Puka and Primo, the U.S. Navy dolphins I’d worked with in Kaneohe. Both had failed to rise to the rank of mine hunter. The more romantic visitors to the lab said that the dolphin’s instinctive pacifism was behind the smiling animals’ refusal to join in the business of man’s destructiveness. In truth, these two dolphins were just obstinate. Primo, the smaller of the two (and I always suspected the smarter), was brilliant at locating mines. However, he worked only when the mood struck him. Any nearby activity, including schools of swimming fish or a tour boat cruising in the distance, easily distracted him and he’d take off to play. Puka, the pretty boy with dashing gray racing stripes on his melon, was the lover. He had no desire to venture into deep water and find submerged mines. Female dolphins were his target and eventually led to his dismissal from the Dolphin Systems. In the end the Navy could not risk the lives of men and women with such unreliable oceanic watchdogs.
With the 1994 closure of the Navy’s Dolphin Systems program in Hawaii, Puka and Primo were transferred to California along with Austin and me. When the Navy decided to officially retire the boys, I offered them a home at Long Marine Lab. Since then they had spent their days in the company of an enthusiastic corps of volunteers consisting primarily of young female students from the university. The women unabashedly doted on the two dolphins, which fit Primo’s and Puka’s personalities perfectly.
The remaining three occupants of my lab, Wick, Morgan, and Taylor, were also dropouts, this time from the Monterey Bay Aquarium sea otter rehabilitation program. Like KP2, the three male otters had been found injured or abandoned by their mothers during coastal storms. The aquarium had raised them from pups to juveniles and released them back into the bay. One by one they returned to the aquarium because they failed to recognize that they were sea otters. In the wild, the otter boys climbed on sea kayaks, harassed divers, and generally roved around the coastal waters like gang members. But it was Morgan who earned a reputation that still had reporters coming to my lab to photograph him.
Morgan the sea otter was publicly known as a convicted rapist and killer; in truth he was little different from other wild sea otters. When released by the aquarium, the large male otter had swum north to an inland waterway called Elkhorn Slough. Cruising along the shoreline, he encountered another ocean creature of the same approximate size and shape as himself. These new creatures sunbathed along the shore, gathered in groups, and paddled in the shallow waters of the slough. Morgan was infatuated with them. Using his strong forearms, he selected a mate as any healthy male sea otter might. Unfortunately, the object of his affection was a harbor seal pup. In the process of coupling the seal pup drowned. Undaunted, Morgan chose another and then another, with the same dreadful consequences. For months Morgan terrorized the harbor seal colony of Elkhorn Slough until he could be recaptured and “sent to college” at my lab.
Over the years, under Traci’s tutelage, Morgan was rehabilitated. He was turned into one of the best-trained and most valuable research sea otters in the country. Morgan could dive and swim on command. With Traci holding on to his front paw, he would rest quietly on the water surface while researchers took heart rate and temperature measurements. During his veterinary checkups he would crawl into a kennel when requested and then lie still while a blood sample was taken. He was unflappable and reliable. But we never dared put him in the same pool with another animal. There was no sense in tempting fate.
• • •
AS KP2 MADE THE ROUNDS, I saw my lab for what it was: a collection of outcasts. All of the animals in one way or another had failed in their respective societies. As such they were deemed by others as nature’s surplus. Many would have faced certain euthanasia had I not intervened and offered them a last chance. I saw something different: rather than misfits, they were species ambassadors.
Over the years the dolphins had been employed as models for killer whale metabolism and involved in projects to determine the effects of oceanic noise on marine mammals. The otters were used to predict the unique caloric, metabolic, and thermal requirements of their wild counterparts along the California coast. Even the birds had a job: they taught the volunteer students in my lab the nuances of operant conditioning in animal training. We could not afford training mistakes during research with the marine mammals. So the abandoned birds were enlisted and proved to be the perfect, enthusiastic training ground. With the help of Beau and Traci, every animal in my lab was transformed into an invaluable partner in our conservation efforts. Fittingly, the whole place was directed by someone whose greatest ambition in early life was to be a dog.
• • •
“THIS IS IT! Come on up! Water!” Beau encouraged the monk seal to climb up a handicap ramp leading to his new home. KP2 slowly inched his way onto a deck next to a saltwater pool thirty feet in diameter and eleven feet deep. Traci and Nate Moore, a facilities technician for the lab, had created a giant version of the previous sealarium by walling the entire area with Plexiglas and topping it with the greenhouse plastic sheeting.
KP2 lost no time wriggling into the heated 85°F water. Unbeknownst to him, there was a small underwater viewing window. On his first dive, he suddenly saw our smiling faces in the glass. He somersaulted several times in front of us and then sped away, enjoying the freedom to swim and dive again.
I had been warned from animal caretakers at SeaWorld that monk seals were exceptionally curious and would stick their heads into any opening. All drains had to be covered to prevent an accidental drowning. KP2 lived up to his species’s quirkiness by immediately becoming fascinated with the water outflow pipe. Shoving his muzzle into the pipe, he let the water stream past his whiskers for minutes on end. The water came directly from Monterey Bay, and I wondered what the seal found so attractive in it.
“Maybe he can smell or taste wild seals in the water,” I suggested to Traci and Beau as KP2 floated blissfully with his eyes closed under the waterfall.
To divert his attention from the pipe, the trainers provided KP2 with a
wide variety of toys, including plastic boat bumpers, barrels, and floats. Two items quickly became his favorites, both reminders of his days in Hawaii. The first was a bowling ball. Like the coral rocks he’d maneuvered with his muzzle in Kaneohe Bay to find fish, KP2 head-butted the heavy ball around and around the bottom of his pool until the floor paint began to chip. He wasn’t looking for fish, he just enjoyed underwater games.
KP2 latched onto another toy with such fervor that we couldn’t wrench it away from the seal’s flippers. It was a pink plastic children’s slide that floated on the water. Instantly, KP2 began surfing and sleeping on it. In the water, he flopped his body on top of the board with enough force to create a wave for surfing. Then he extended the ride by propelling with his eggbeater hind flippers. On deck the pink slide became his tanning bed.
The young monk seal obviously recognized the pink float from his puppy days when his caretakers had conducted swimming lessons with him in the pool at the Kewalo Research Facility. It also reminded him of the pink boogie board from his wild wharf days, surfing with the children of Molokai in the warm shallow waters of Kaunakakai. Pink was the color of fun.
• • •
WITH KP2 OUT OF QUARANTINE and finally settled into his home in Santa Cruz, the mystery surrounding him immediately dissipated. Journalists stopped calling, special visitor requests declined, and a new, welcome equilibrium in my lab took hold. Finally I could focus on the science of monk seals. The pressure was on from Washington to prove that transferring the monk seal to the mainland had been worth the trouble. Somehow we had to transform this rambunctious animal into a research partner that would enable us to decipher the unique biological needs of his tropical seal species.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” I said to Beau and Traci as we watched KP2 frolic in his new pool. “We’ve got less than fifty years to figure out how to save the monk seal before the species is gone.”
My scientific career had begun with one monk seal extinction and appeared to be on the verge of ending with another. KP2’s cousin species, the Caribbean monk seal, was already gone. These beautiful dark brown seals with cream-colored bellies, once called “sea-wolves” by Christopher Columbus, were killed and eaten by the Italian explorer’s men more than six hundred years ago. The species had disappeared from the warm Caribbean waters during the beginning of my scientific journey. While I studied for my PhD, the only pinniped to call the Gulf of Mexico, Haiti, and Jamaica home never showed its nose. After waiting thirty years the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service officially declared the Caribbean monk seal extinct in 2008. I never even looked up from my books.
Decline in the number of monk seals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands from 1998 to 2006. Each seal symbol represents the total count for that year. The black line indicates a 3.9 percent annual decline in this subpopulation.
NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE, 2007
Now Hawaiian monk seals were teetering on the precipice of extinction. Reasons for the dismal state of the species spanned the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) list of criteria for declaring a population endangered. Marine pollution, vulnerability to disease, rapid changes in habitat quality, competition with fishermen, shark attacks, and infighting among males and females were all factors.
Regardless of the cause, the population trajectory was clear. If the population trend was left unaltered, our children’s children would know the Hawaiian monk seal only as a picture in a book. In the wake of the seal’s disappearance, a generation of baby boomers who had given birth to the environmental movement would be left to explain how we let this unique creature slip through our fingers like a handful of sand.
“Well, that’s the whole point,” Traci responded matter-of-factly to my thoughts. “We’d better get to work!”
In her first small step toward saving KP2’s species, Traci walked deliberately into the food prep kitchen to wash the monk seal’s fish bucket. With her abrupt departure, the little seal popped his head curiously over the edge of the pool wondering what was coming next.
• • •
WHILE THE MEMBERS of my team continued to have nightly stress dreams over the responsibility of caring for such a highly endangered species, outsiders walked right by our monk seal. To others, KP2 was a small, nondescript gray seal, albeit from Hawaii, who enjoyed sunning himself. Like the small-mammal exhibits quickly passed over at zoos, the seal was summarily ignored by visitors who were quickly caught up in the antics of the dancing birds and the constant smile of the dolphins. We learned that, as in Hollywood, when it comes to being endangered, looks are everything.
Unfortunately, in a world of limited resources this meant that an animal’s external appearance rather than ecological significance or population status dictated which species lived and which died. For many endangered animals, survival was cast in black and white. Frank Todd, a retired curator of birds at SeaWorld in San Diego, once remarked, “If it were up to me I’d have a zoo filled with just black-and-white animals.” As the man responsible for bringing black-and-white Antarctic penguins to an aquarium that had made its reputation on black-and-white orcas, there was a lot behind his statement. Over the years Frank watched the public fall in love with, and pay amazing sums of money to see, black-and-white animals.
He imagined a zoo filled with killer whales, panda bears, and penguins. “You could make millions!” he said, laughing, which is precisely what he did for SeaWorld.
Frank had stumbled onto something that scientists had already discovered. There is a deep-rooted human attraction to black-and-white animals with disproportionately large heads and large, dark eyes. Biologists refer to it as the “cute response.” The epitome of the phenomenon was the appeal of Mickey Mouse.
For good and for bad, the cute response has had a powerful influence on the conservation movement and how conservation groups appeal to the public for donations. It does not take much imagination to morph the beloved Mickey into fluffy white dome-headed harp seal pups or the iconic symbol of the World Wildlife Fund, the panda bear. These attractive symbols for conservation move people.
Humans have an innate, biological drive to nurture and protect living beings with babylike qualities. Rounded tummies, big heads and eyes, and stunted limbs bring out the parent in us. Even as a scientist who recognizes the underlying biological mechanism, I am not impervious; hence my attraction to neotenic corgi dogs and seals. Add in the cute factor of black-and-white coloration and humans quickly fall victim to the instinctual desire to nurture. When it involves wild animals, we end up with conservation by the heart.
Instinctual, heartfelt conservation drivers have instigated public outrage about (and Paul McCartney visits to) the Canadian harp seal hunt in which rotund, teary-eyed white pups are killed as they sleep on pristine snow. By comparison, little has been said concerning the northern fur seal harvest in which needle-toothed brown otariids are slain while curled in the Pribilof Islands’ mud. Conservation by the brain would dictate a reversal in attention. The IUCN, the watchdog group for identifying endangered species, classifies the harp seal as a species of “least concern.” This is due to an increasing population that currently exceeds eight million harp seals across the Arctic. In contrast, the northern fur seal is slipping toward endangered status as its population suffers through a devastating 6 percent decline each year even in the absence of large, commercial hunting operations.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t protect all animals. The question is, where should we begin?
The Hawaiian monk seal, due to its isolation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and its unpretentious gray fur, seems to melt into the endangered species background. It is difficult to care about an endangered animal whose greatest talent seems to be sunbathing on beaches 1,860 ocean miles away from everywhere. However, the Hawaiian monk seal, with a population of only eleven hundred sur
viving individuals, has reached the pinnacle of IUCN listing categories: “critically endangered.” There are fewer Hawaiian monk seals than panda bears or the newest icon for global warming, the polar bear. If the entire world’s population of Hawaiian monk seals were lined up nose to tail, they would not even span the length of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There are more minutes in a day and more jewels in Princess Diana’s wedding tiara than there are Hawaiian monk seals. Which should humans consider the more precious?
• • •
“WHAT ARE WE GOING to do with you?” I asked as the seal soaked my shoes by placing a wet chin on my foot. I resisted the urge to pet his wet round head. Our official mandate from the National Marine Fisheries Service was to care for the nearly blind seal until a date for his cataract surgery was set. But his species needed so much more. The seal seemed to sense the concern in my body language and cuddled up even closer. I ignored his overtures as I tried to decide my next steps.
The Hawaiian Monk Seal Recovery Plan, NOAA’s handbook for saving the species, was 150 pages long. Twenty-one pages presented the intimate details of the population decline over the past half century; less than three pages were dedicated to the inner biology of the animal. The meager section began with the statement “Comparatively little physiological research has been done on Hawaiian monk seals.”
The reason for the paucity of data was obvious. Wild Hawaiian monk seals were too few in number, the population was too fragile, and the species far too endangered to handle for biological studies. Like so many other endangered animals, the Hawaiian monk seal had fallen into a bureaucratic trap. The same governmental regulations that protected endangered animals from human disturbance also prevented scientists from touching them. Consequently, Hawaiian monk seals and the other hands-off endangered species were in danger of being counted right into extinction.
The Odyssey of KP2 Page 11