The Odyssey of KP2

by Terrie M. Williams

  “How the heck did you get him to do that?”

  “I just figured he needed a little help,” Beau replied matter-of-factly while watching KP2 float quietly in the spa. “He has so much blubber that he was having trouble floating in one place. Since he already knew how to rest his muzzle on a stand for his eye exams, I just added a new chin rest to his spa.”

  Beau was being too modest in his assessment. In truth he and KP2 had come to an agreement. The breakthrough had occurred during an especially long training session several weeks back. It had been an exhausting session for both the seal and the trainer, one in which, for the hundredth time, Beau asked the seal to enter the spa pool and float for ten minutes without diving, without swimming or splashing, without vocalizing or trying to climb out. On this one day Beau perceived a flicker of understanding in KP2. Whether the seal was trying to disarm Beau or finally understood the chain of behaviors can be debated. Regardless, the light finally went on in his brain.

  To KP2, the chin rest was like floating on a new kind of boogie board, a habit that had stayed with him from his first days in the rehabilitation pools at the Kewalo Research Facility and his frolicking good times with paddlers at Kaunakakai Wharf. He eagerly rested on it. Once the seal was in position, Traci added one last piece of equipment: the skylight dome.

  Under the clear plastic, KP2 watched Beau intently, never letting his eyes wander while resting in the water. By continuously taking samples of the exhaust air from the dome, I began to measure KP2’s metabolism using a calibrated oxygen analyzer, the one piece of high-tech equipment involved in the tests.

  “People pay big bucks for this in fitness centers,” I informed the seal. KP2 yawned back. The trainers and I knew that the test would last only as long as the seal felt like cooperating. It was his choice to stay on the chin rest or to leave.

  For some animals, leaving the skylight dome could be quite spectacular. Big males never seemed to understand the strength of their bony skulls. Woody, a thousand-pound adult male Steller sea lion, and Sivuqaq, a seven-hundred-pound male Pacific walrus, both managed to accidentally pulverize skylight domes with their enormous blocky heads when they inadvertently backed up. In the Antarctic, a male Weddell seal once mistook the skylight Plexiglas for a thin layer of ice. After a couple of trial pushes using his nose to press gently on the skylight, he submerged and then explosively popped up, breaking a clean hole in the dome with his muzzle. Marine mammals, especially male marine mammals, liked to use their thick skulls as battering rams, which wreaked havoc on my metabolic equipment.

  To prevent KP2 from doing likewise, Beau had discovered a solution to the seal’s boredom. Borrowing from Wiki, the cockatoo, the trainer began to bob and dance in front of the spa pool. Whenever KP2’s eyes began to drift, the trainer in Hawaiian board shorts broke into a dance. He quickstepped and shuffled. He jumped and swayed. The trainer did everything to keep the seal’s attention for the entire metabolic session. After fifteen minutes Beau clinched a perfect session with a country-western two-step.

  “Done!” I shouted from behind the oxygen analyzer. “We got the data point!” Traci immediately raised the skylight dome while Beau began feeding KP2 fish as fast as the seal would swallow. We finally had our first metabolic data point for a Hawaiian monk seal—a data point sixteen years in the making, if you counted the time it took to obtain a permit.

  “It’s 5.07 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body mass per minute,” I announced proudly to the team. “That translates to twenty-eight hundred calories a day for a resting seal—about the same as a moderately active human.” The numbers were not as important to the others as was the completion of a successful session. For the first time everything, from the equipment to the people to the seal, had gone perfectly. It was a historic day for all, and with that Beau finally collapsed in exhaustion.

  Back in my office I recorded our first data point in my notebook and created a graph, comprising a lone circle on a white field, that showed KP2’s metabolic rate in relation to water temperature. My mind spun with questions, now that I had a starting point. KP2’s metabolic data point was high in comparison with adult Weddell seals but low compared with Weddell pups. Could that mean that tropical seals had turned down their metabolic thermostat? Does that make monk seals better or poorer divers? How would water temperature affect the seal’s metabolism?

  “Now all we have to do is fill in the rest of the points,” I said to myself. Energized by the prospect of embarking on a new scientific scavenger hunt, I decided it was time for a celebratory jog down the beach.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, BEAU WENT BACK to the sealarium with KP2, both of them weary from the day’s activities and concentration. Under the humid canopy he started talking to the seal.

  “Thank you for your hard work,” Beau said quietly.

  KP2 sat in the water listening to the trainer who had spent so many hours working with him day after day.

  “I hope your journey through this project will be enjoyable,” Beau continued. He spoke of everything and nothing to the attentive seal. In a one-way conversation he discussed their individual journeys, their past, present, and future, and ended on what he planned to do for the rest of the night.

  Beau had no misperceptions about what the monk seal actually understood in terms of his words. Rather, the trainer recognized the one thing that KP2 loved: people. KP2, as a hand-raised pup, thrived on human company. The sound of their voices was as soothing as any tropical wave washing over his body. So the trainer gave himself and all his inner thoughts to the seal that day as a special reward for his patience under the skylight dome.

  When Beau finally ran out of words, KP2 hauled out onto the deck next to him and fell fast asleep. Maybe his choice of sleeping spot just happened to be where the sun was streaming in, or maybe it was the comfort of Beau’s presence, but a deep connection was forged between man and seal in that quiet moment.

  • • •

  WITH A PARTNERSHIP FORGED in friendship and fish, my team began to unravel the secret biology of monk seals, a biology that had remained hidden for over fifteen million years. I found it both remarkable and depressing that we had come to such a desperate crossroads for this species. We were in a race to discover everything we could about these Hawaiian pinnipeds before it was too late for the species. Every data point for KP2 represented another piece of the monk seal puzzle and another clue to his species’s survival.

  Once KP2 mastered the art of sitting still, we began to add environmental variations. In one of the first series of tests, we determined the effect of water temperature on his metabolism. How he responded would help delineate where along the Hawaiian archipelago monk seals should raise their young. The poor survivorship of Hawaiian monk juveniles made locating the ideal environment for their early years a priority. In the face of rapid changes in ocean temperatures and ever increasing pressure from human activities, carving out a private place for monk seals was becoming increasingly difficult. Knowing the preferred environments of the seals was the first step in developing biologically meaningful sanctuaries.

  Early each morning, Traci filled the spa pool with the experimental temperature of the day. To keep us honest, neither KP2 nor I knew whether she was going for a chilly deepwater thermocline or tropical lagoon warmth. It didn’t take long to guess the pool temperature. KP2 let us know loud and clear what he thought of Traci’s daily choice, even without the benefit of my expensive oxygen analyzer.

  “Snnneeww,” KP2 exhaled in long, slow breaths as he floated luxuriously when the spa pool was filled with 86°F water. The seal was completely relaxed when Traci cranked up the temperatures. Soaking in the warmth, he was back in the islands relishing the heat from his private cove; the warmer the water temperature the better, according to the behavior of the small seal.

  The reverse occurred on the mornings that KP2 dipped into the pool
set at diving temperatures. He’d dunk his nose to test the water, look back up at Beau, then the water, and then Beau again.

  “Water, Hoa,” Beau called in his usual encouraging voice. KP2 was no fool and was unmotivated by the trainer’s false cheeriness.

  Despite his obvious reservation, KP2 always slipped into the water even if it was chilled to 60°F. His body language and the speed at which he entered the spa told me the water temperature more accurately than any calibrated thermometer. On the chilliest mornings KP2 would slowly ooze into the cold water and then add a Three Stooges “whup, whup, whup” to voice his displeasure before the metabolic measurement.

  KP2’s cooperation paid off when we compared his metabolic rates for all of the water temperatures tested. When the data points were plotted side by side, it was apparent that temperatures below 60°F challenged the young seal and instigated a rise in his metabolic rate. This was our first clue that deep diving came at a high cost to young Hawaiian monk seals. Habitats where fish resided in cold, deep waters would be a caloric tightwire act for these animals as they tried to balance the metabolic calories expended to keep warm against the calories ingested when they finally caught a fish.

  With overfishing and changes in fish distributions as oceanic temperatures fluctuated, the caloric challenge had became dire for monk seals as they swam farther and dove deeper to find food. The young seal’s warm-water metabolic biology also revealed another important clue about their survival. Based on our findings, it appeared that Hawaiian monk seals were locked biologically into tropical paradise. Unlike highly mobile marine mammals, such as humpback whales, that visited the islands each winter to breed and give birth but then migrated thirty-five hundred miles to the cold, nutrient-rich waters of Alaska to feed, Hawaiian monk seals were oceanic prisoners due to a biology that demanded warmth. As such the seals had to make peace with the islands’ native fishermen or go extinct.

  There was more to the unique biology of the Hawaiian monk seal than simple metabolism. Internally, monk seals were built differently than any of the other seals or whales I’d studied. During necropsies to determine the cause of death in stranded marine mammals, I had always been amazed by the extraordinary length of their small intestines. The guts of dogs, humans, lions, and other terrestrial mammals looked like coiled bicycle inner tubes. In contrast, the intestines of marine mammals appeared as yards and yards of balled yarn stuffed into their abdomens. Inspecting the guts during a necropsy, I looked like a magician pulling a never-ending trail of scarves out of a top hat.

  The guts were so impressive that I began to measure small-intestine lengths in as many different species as possible, and found that exceptionally long intestines were a defining characteristic in marine mammals. Retriever dogs have a 9-foot small intestine while a similarly-sized harbor seal has an amazing 49-foot intestine. The human small intestine is 16.5 feet long while a dolphin’s is 102 feet and the killer whale’s is a whopping 177 feet long. End to end an orca intestine spans the height of the Statue of Liberty from base to torch and then some.

  I hypothesized that such extraordinarily long guts were important for heating marine mammals. Water robs a mammal’s body heat twenty-four times faster than air at the same temperature. That is why submerged humans quickly succumb to hypothermia even in relatively temperate waters. Marine mammals solved this problem with a thick insulating blubber layer coupled to an internal heater. The act of processing food provided the heat; long intestines allowed that process to occur fast enough and long enough to keep the animals warm even in the chilliest of Antarctic waters. But what if the marine mammal lived in hot water?

  The answer was in the guts of monk seals. The small intestine of a monk seal the size of KP2 is thirty-six feet long, four times that of a dog but thirteen feet shorter than the intestinal length of its cold-water-dwelling harbor seal cousin. Among marine mammals, it seemed that a warm-water lifestyle had permanently restructured the internal organs of the monk seal, thereby creating another barrier for this species ever to leave the islands. More than any other marine mammal species in the islands, the Hawaiian monk seal was biologically linked to the warm waters of paradise.

  By my calculations, they could never survive the long, cold-water swim that would be required to reach another home if humans refused to share the ocean.

  15.

  Killer Appetites

  No sooner had we collected and published our data on KP2’s metabolism than it was used against him and his species. From the very beginning not every islander embraced KP2 or the ever increasing presence of his species in the main Hawaiian Islands. Rather, the encroaching monk seals with all their caloric needs were viewed as competitors for dwindling oceanic resources. To make matters worse, things were changing rapidly in Hawaii’s coastal ecosystems, just as they were all over the world. Local lobster fisheries had crashed in the late 1980s and the groundfish fisheries were in trouble. Recreational and commercial fishermen saw in monk seals the final nail in the coffin of their faltering business. Making a living on the water for sport or sustenance had become increasingly difficult in Hawaii. With the double knot of rising fuel prices and collapsing fish stocks, local fishermen felt an ever tightening noose choking the life out of their livelihood, a practice that had been a part of their island families for generations.

  I empathized with those who lived on the water. My life had been spent in the company of fishermen. My father had fished the waters of Chesapeake Bay. My brother still fished the bass lakes and coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. With the exception of my mother, who could never bring herself to move farther than ankle deep along a beach, we all had succumbed to the lure of the ocean. Salt water truly flowed in our veins. However, we loved the seas from opposite ends of a fishing pole, which could create friction on a boat.

  “How can you be a fisherman and believe you are not affecting the ecosystem?” I’d ask.

  “How can you be raised a Catholic and believe in evolution?” my father would retaliate.

  Some things defied explanation.

  I did not possess the soul of a fisherman. They had a rabid passion for catching fish that seemed spurred on by hidden demons, as if someone else might hook a fish before them. I didn’t understand their devils nor could they understand the ease with which I’d allow a sea lion, dolphin, or shark to steal a fish off my line.

  We’d spar as families do, with no resolution. In their minds the ocean’s bounties were endless and theirs to exploit. In my mind we had reached a point where sharing was essential if we all expected to survive.

  • • •

  CLEARLY, IF KP2 AND HIS species were to survive, they would have to obey nature’s biological rules as well as man’s territorial rules. In modern Hawaii this had developed into a tenuous situation as seals and humans alike overstepped the ancient line separating them. KP2 had entered into the human realm where no wild animal belonged; he compounded the transgression by befriending the swimmers and surfers of Kaunakakai Wharf. His rescuers, including myself, had crossed into the seal’s world and violated the cardinal rule of allowing nature to take its course; we had intervened when a seal mother and nature dictated that KP2 should have died the day he was orphaned.

  In recent years the population of monk seals had slowly expanded southward, leaving the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to arrive on the beaches of Kauai, Molokai, Oahu, Niihau, Lanai, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawaii. Fourteen years earlier when I’d lived in the islands, a monk seal sighting was a cause célèbre, a rare occasion filled with wonder and excitement as these exotic creatures hauled their quicksilver bodies out of the surf. Since then the number of monk seal mothers giving birth in the main Hawaiian Islands had increased annually. The animals arrived unannounced, gave birth, and then disappeared abruptly six weeks later once their pups were weaned. Locals were afforded only a brief glimpse into the monk seals’ world. The problem now was that more and mo
re of the tourist seals, like their human counterparts, were deciding to stay.

  Based on our metabolic findings, there was no denying that young monk seals had a healthy appetite for fish. Compared to adults, juvenile monk seals were like growing teenagers. A growing monk seal’s caloric demands translated into a choice of twenty-three pounds of octopus, ten pounds of eel, or sixteen pounds of spiny lobster per day to survive in the wild. For some island fishermen, especially those who had spent a lifetime on the water, this level of gluttony was intolerable. Consequently, while KP2 was making scientific discoveries in my lab on the mainland, his wild cohort was being attacked.

  In December a twenty-year-old male monk seal, renowned for his enormous size and missing hind flipper due to an earlier shark bite, was found floating in the waters of Kaunakakai where KP2 once played with the local children. Leimana Naki, a paddler, made the grisly discovery and towed the seal in by kayak. A necropsy performed by government officials determined that the seal had been intentionally killed but did not elaborate as to how the animal died.

  The Kaunakakai seal was the latest incident in a disturbing trend. Seven months earlier on KP2’s birth island of Kauai, a seventy-eight-year-old local had hoisted a Browning .22 caliber rifle to his shoulder and fired four rounds at a tagged female monk seal known as RK06. Two of the rounds found their mark, killing the fifteen-year-old pregnant female in the shallow waters near Miloli’i Beach. Her intention in arriving at the Garden Island had been to give birth to her male pup. The elderly man’s intention had been to scare her out of the area to prevent competition for fish. He had failed to recognize that female seals rarely ate during the nursing period; their pups fed only on milk.

  In the middle of this conflict between monk seals and local fishermen, federal scientists proposed a radical idea. In the Hawaiian Islands nearly all the monk seals born the same year as KP2 were already dead. Oddly, some of the worst-hit areas were not where one would have predicted. Rather than the heavily trafficked waters of the main Hawaiian Islands, it was the most pristine Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, situated in a newly designated marine reserve, that represented the death trap where pups and juveniles were disappearing in vast numbers. To correct the problem, Dr. Charles Littnan, the lead scientist for the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program under the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, and a team of federal and nonfederal scientists proposed moving young seals into the fishermen’s oceanic backyard. As outlandish as it sounded, their logic was simple.