The Odyssey of KP2

by Terrie M. Williams

  • • •

  WITH HIS DIMINISHING EYESIGHT, KP2 would not stand a chance against plastics floating along the coastline. My dream of release for the seal had become hopelessly entangled in the marine debris issue.

  Yet all was not lost. According to the elders of Molokai, destiny had another plan for the young seal. He was Ho‘ailona, a sign. Although he was unable to return to the oceans, KP2 could do something no other monk seal could accomplish. He could make the waters of Hawaii a safer place for the rest of his wild family.

  “Okay, Ho‘ailona,” I informed KP2 after his eye exam. “It is time for you to live up to your name and be a voice for the oceans.”

  21.

  The Voice of the Ocean

  KP2 as Ho‘ailona immediately instituted a war against plastics and marine pollution on his Web site and Facebook page. He asked young students to clean up their schools and adults to clean up rivers and beaches. “All water is connected,” he reminded them over the Internet.

  One of his first targets was plastic bottles. Recognizing the landfill overburden created by disposable water bottles and juice containers used in schools, the seal called for a reduction in disposable plastic containers by children. He offered to send a sticker with his picture on it to anyone switching to a reusable bottle.

  To illustrate his cause, I attempted to conduct a photo session with KP2. My idea was to have the seal pose next to my Nalgene bottle decorated with one of his stickers. What began as a photo shoot ended as a soccer match between me and the seal. To my surprise, KP2 found the Nalgene bottle irresistible. After posing politely next to the bottle, he proceeded to drag it into his pool as if it were a newly discovered coconut.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” I countered, and tried to scoot the bottle back onto the deck. The seal anticipated my move and threw a body block on top. Maneuvering around the immovable seal, I tried to find his weak spot. He couldn’t roll the bottle without opening his guard. “It’s just a matter of time, old boy,” I challenged him.

  But the crafty seal was faster than I imagined. Positioning his chin on the bottle as if he were giving up, KP2 hugged the bottle and rolled his body toward the pool. If he reached the water I’d never stand a chance of retrieving the bottle, so I lunged for it. The seal’s only miscalculation was the slipperiness of the plastic. He squeezed a little too hard with his front flippers in his getaway and the bottle shot back within my reach.

  Unlike the stepladder tug-of-war, the scientist won this time. But the battle also emphasized the link between monk seal behavior and marine pollution. KP2’s game demonstrated the exceptional curiosity of monk seals and how quickly they were attracted to novel garbage in their environment. In this regard, they were like the Alaskan sea otters that were so curious about new things in their habitat that they were actually attracted to the crude oil during the Exxon Valdez spill. Monk seals, including KP2, had a similar fatal behavioral flaw.

  • • •

  LOCAL SCHOOL GROUPS soon picked up KP2’s cause, especially in light of the recent discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of discarded plastics and debris that swirls for miles in the Pacific Ocean. One class stood out in its unwavering dedication to the problem. Jessica Cambell’s fifth-grade class at Mount Madonna School in Watsonville, California, not only wanted to stop marine pollution, they were going to stop it. She e-mailed me with a simple request: “Will you serve as a science mentor for my fifth-grade class project? They have decided to save sea otters from marine pollution.”

  I stared at Jessica’s message in all of its naïveté, considering whether to delete it or pass it off to one of my graduate students. I had adult-sized, global problems to worry about. I had massive bills to pay, permits to write, classes to teach, and animals that constantly needed feeding. Somehow I had to find a grant or the animals and I were going to end up on the street.

  With a single stroke of the delete button, Jessica, fellow teacher Sri McCaughan, and the fifth graders of Mount Madonna School would dissolve into the computer ether. My hand hovered over the keyboard. But I couldn’t erase the e-mail. I saw my young self with a pocketful of baby birds and mice facing the imposing black penguinlike silhouettes of the nuns shaking their habited heads. The years had switched our roles, and I found the prospect alarming.

  A week later I met with the teachers. They had been studying sea otters and decided to organize a beach cleanup near the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

  “The kids love the ocean, although most of them do not live near the coast,” Jessica said excitedly. “They decided on a project to save the endangered sea otters in Monterey Bay. They’ve also been studying marine pollution and how it threatens the animals’ survival. So they want to clean it up!”

  “Saving sea otters is good . . . ,” I admitted. “But would you consider a bigger project for your kids?” I launched into KP2’s story and explained how entanglement in marine debris was a factor contributing to the demise of his species in Hawaii. I told Jessica and Sri about the children of Molokai and their shared passion for the ocean. “Your students’ story is exactly the same as theirs,” I concluded. “They also love an endangered species—you have the California sea otter, they have the Hawaiian monk seal.”

  It didn’t take long to craft the framework of a transpacific science project with the school teachers. Before we parted, I added one more piece. Recalling the many sunsets watched from my office, I related my feeling that only the waters of the Pacific separated KP2 from his wild cohort, and that theoretically a water ripple could travel between our coast and the islands. “Maybe the kids in California and Hawaii could clean up beach trash and then touch the Pacific Ocean at the same time,” I suggested tentatively to the teachers. “It would be a tangible way for them to connect with one another.”

  Hence was born Worldwide Waste Reduction Day and the California-Hawaii toe touch.

  Jessica and Sri contacted elementary schools in Hawaii and quickly found a compatriot in Diane Abraham, a schoolteacher from Molokai. As an avid paddler, she had experienced a few close encounters with KP2 during the seal’s time at Kaunakakai Wharf.

  “I had my own up close and personal with him myself,” she wrote. “I paddle an ocean canoe, and he thought the canoe was a toy just for him, and put his head on top of it, trying to get on board. I was afraid he would make me huli (tip over), so I tried to get him off with my paddle. Wrong move. He thought it was a game I was playing. This went on for a good ten minutes. A friend on shore had to lure him away so I could make my escape. He is a playful guy!”

  With the project growing, the response from NMFS in Hawaii became cautionary. “Don’t bring KP2 into this,” David Schofield warned as he fretted over renewed protests on Molokai against his agency. With the new monk seal translocation scheme on the table, this was not the time to get people from the main Hawaiian Islands agitated. His outreach assistant added, “You can’t have mainlanders telling Hawaiians to clean up their beaches.”

  “It’s too late,” I replied matter-of-factly. “It’s already happening.”

  At this point there was no stopping the schoolchildren from talking to one another. Schools from three different Hawaiian islands had already signed up for the beach cleanup and simultaneous toe touch with Mount Madonna School. Barbara Jean Kahawaii’s class from Laie Elementary School would be working on the north shore of Oahu. Laurie Madani’s fifth-grade class from Kaunakakai Elementary School on Molokai would be touching the ocean at Kaunakakai Wharf. The Kona Pacific Charter School would clean beaches on the Big Island, and Diane and her volunteers would be cleaning another Molokai beach. At the same time, nearly twenty-four hundred miles away, Mount Madonna School would be working on the beaches of Santa Cruz near my lab and KP2.

  Sharing conservation concerns across the ocean was eye-opening for both the children and the teachers. Life on the islands added a whole new dimension to the problem
of waste reduction that few mainlanders ever considered. Diane sent several e-mails explaining how critical recycling was when you lived in such small quarters as an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She taught all of us that most islanders on Molokai grew their own produce. Her own garden, squeezed into a tiny yard, included spinach, lettuce, radishes, beans, squash, cucumbers, strawberries, lilikoi (passion fruit), mountain apple, chili peppers, basil, banana, and papaya. By sharing with neighbors they increased the size of their collective gardening, and on any given day Diane would come home to find a cabbage or some kale waiting on her lanai.

  • • •

  DURING THE EARLY MORNING HOURS of Worldwide Waste Reduction Day, a marine fog rolled onto Main Beach in Santa Cruz and threatened to dampen the cleanup. When I drove up at nine a.m., the sun had forced its way through the mist and children were busy sifting through every foot of beach sand.

  Save Our Shores, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting the ecology of the Monterey Bay, had outfitted dozens of children with large green pails, trash grabber poles, and plastic gloves. Schoolchildren of all ages scoured the high-tide debris with the intensity of an Easter egg hunt. Plastic bottles, cigarettes, candy wrappers, and much more filled the buckets as the ninth-grade class of Mount Madonna School joined with preschoolers, kindergartners, fifth graders, and their parents.

  While the others picked up trash, one of the older girls broke from the swarm of beach cleaners and walked down to the surf zone. She drew a giant heart in the sand and wrote “peace” on the inside. Then the teachers, children, and parents all gathered around the heart holding hands. Young and old were silent as Jessica spoke about the oceans and how humans had an important role in preserving the environment. She asked for their commitment by having all of them place a foot inside the giant heart. After a moment of reflection she instructed, “Okay, line up!”

  The children ran laughing to the tide line facing to the west. Thousands of miles away across the Pacific on the island of Molokai, on the beach at Kaunakakai Wharf where KP2 once spent his first birthday in the arms of the Hawaiian children, his old friends also lined up. At eleven thirty a.m. Pacific time and nine thirty a.m. Hawaii time, children of the mainland and the islands ran into the water. Ignoring the chill of the California water, the children splashed and jumped while Jessica spoke on her cell phone to the teachers in Hawaii. In the background she could hear the same sound of children laughing across the ocean.

  All of a sudden the mood changed. “Look—look out!” shouted a tiny girl, pointing into the Santa Cruz waves. In front of the splashing children a domed head appeared offshore. Just as quickly it disappeared. Then several minutes later it popped up again a little closer to the group. Parents lined up with their sons and daughters to identify the curious onlooker.

  “It’s a seal!” one of the fathers identified correctly. “Did it swim all the way from Hawaii?”

  The unusual visitor was a cousin to the Hawaiian monk seal that lived down the coast. I’d never seen a harbor seal at Main Beach in Santa Cruz before. The black-and-white spotted seals usually spent their time lolling around the rocky shore and kelp beds of Monterey to the south. So I was pleased that the animal had chosen that moment to make an appearance. His audience on the beach was made up of children who would one day grow up to be the adults responsible for caring for his ocean home. The teachers standing in the sand had ensured his protection by giving their students one special gift: environmental connectedness. The young harbor seal and I had been lucky enough to witness their entry into the fold.

  • • •

  WORLDWIDE WASTE REDUCTION DAY and KP2 spread the word about plastics and marine pollution across the country and across the continents. While the schoolchildren of California and Hawaii splashed on their respective sides of the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Cruz Public Defender’s Office and members of KQED in San Francisco picked up street trash that could have fallen into drainages to the coast. Adults and children in South Carolina, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington State cleaned rivers, beaches, and fields.

  In Texas, high school students in Fort Worth were reeling from the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Drawn to the plight of marine animals facing man’s waste, they sponsored a campus cleanup in honor of KP2. Using the trash they had collected during the cleanup, they separated the plastic bottles, cans, and plastic bags. Taping them together and covering the trash sculpture with papier-mâché, they formed the first life-sized Hawaiian monk seal to visit a Texas high school. They painted their seal with KP2’s silvery gray and white coloration and displayed their creation in the lobby of their school to inspire others to reduce pollution. The students named their seal Nani, which they told me meant “beautiful” in Hawaiian.

  The inspiration of KP2’s message did not stop there. Pictures from conservation-minded individuals poured in from around the world. Men, women, and children sent pictures of themselves and their collected trash from India, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Australia, Spain, Japan, and Kosovo. They did this for the oceans. They did this without the benefit of ever having met a small seal named KP2.

  Afterward, the fifth graders from Mount Madonna School presented their project to the entire school assembly. Among their presentations was an original hula dance for KP2 set to the music of Lono’s song “Ho‘ailona.” Together the children of California raised their voices for their new friends in Hawaii, “Please, oh please, bring Ho‘ailona home!”

  • • •

  WALTER RITTE AND HIS WIFE were moved enough to board several planes from Molokai to Oahu to California to visit KP2 in Santa Cruz. They wanted to see the seal for themselves and learn what we had been doing with him. Known as Uncle Walter and Aunty Loretta at home, the Rittes rarely left the islands and were somewhat daunted by the bustle of San Francisco International Airport and the Bay Area traffic.

  I was also anxious about the meeting, unsure what to expect from Walter. To me he was the “Molokai activist.” I was afraid he would see KP2 in our pools and contact the media about scientists imprisoning the monk seal that once swam freely in the waters of Molokai.

  Instead, what the Rittes saw was KP2 teaching children. When they walked into the marine mammal compound, KP2 was sitting on the walkway with Beau in front of a line of spellbound schoolchildren. Each child had a notebook and was busily writing down data as Beau measured the seal’s skin temperature along his body. They were studying the monk seal’s “homeless pose” and determining if temperature regulation was related to the species’s odd habit of snuggling beach trash.

  Walter and Loretta were incredulous; they had never seen anything quite like it. In Hawaii, KP2 had been a playmate and a comic. When other wild monk seals came up on public beaches, NMFS volunteers would often cordon them off with yellow police tape to keep people at a distance. Even in aquariums, Hawaiian monk seals were behind glass or across moats to prevent human contact. Here was a seal where there were no barriers. The Rittes immediately recognized the empathy for the seal in the children’s eyes.

  Once the lesson was over, the children thanked KP2 as he followed Beau back to his pool. Alone with the seal at last, Walter and Loretta reacted with the heartfelt cheer of any reunion with beloved family.

  “Oh, KP2, there you are!” Loretta crooned as she raced up to the Plexiglas partition of the sealarium. Walter stood behind smiling widely.

  Hearing the visitors, KP2 surfed across his pool and popped onto the deck. Without hesitation he shoved his muzzle on the partition in his usual whiskered greeting. Walter watched without comment with the seal clearly focused on his movements.

  I stood off to the side and could see KP2’s curiosity with the island visitors. He always greeted folks, and then after a few moments went back to swimming. This time he stayed. He listened to the sound of their voices and sniffed the air through a small gap in the bottom of the wall separating him from them.
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br />   “Maybe he can smell the island of Molokai on you,” I suggested with a laugh.

  Walter considered my comment for a moment and then bent down to slowly exhale into the same gap in the wall. For several minutes the seal and the islander breathed each other’s air.

  • • •

  THE VISIT BY THE RITTES served to break down so many barriers and misunderstandings that had prevented communication between my lab and the islanders. Walter and Loretta taught me about Hawaiian culture and the relationship between the islanders and the oceans. In turn, we taught them about the science of saving an endangered species. The transition was easy once we recognized that we were connected by a common love of Hawaiian monk seals.

  We also shared a common insight about the special orphaned seal in front of us. KP2’s ocean message and his new role as teacher and ambassador were key to the survival of his species.

  22.

  Aloha Hoa

  Months later, I received a phone call.

  “We need KP2.” Walter Ritte was whispering so quietly on the phone I was unsure I had heard him correctly. “He has been blessed as Ho‘ailona, and he needs to speak for the oceans.” The man sounded tired.

  Walter had been talking with Karen Holt, the executive director of the Molokai Community Service Council, when they decided to call me. For months NOAA had been collecting opinions and getting an earful from local Hawaiian fishermen across the islands voicing their concerns about monk seals and the government agency’s proposed translocation of seals to the main Hawaiian Islands. The idea of flying newly weaned female pups hundreds of miles south, from areas of low juvenile survival in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to areas of high survival in the main islands, was unprecedented for the species. The fishermen were skeptical about the ability of NMFS scientists to recapture the grown seals several years later and return them to their original capture sites.