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Quick Facts:

  • There are fewer than 1,100 Hawaiian monk seals left in the world!
  • The population of Hawaiian monk seals is decreasing at a rate of 4% every year!
  • Hawaiian monk seals are the only marine mammal solely in US waters.
  • Funding for the Hawaiian monk seal has never reached what is recommended by the recovery plan ($7 million/year) t0 recover this species.






For more information about these and other marine issues, please contact the Marine Conservation Institute's policy and science experts.
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Yesterday the New York Times Magazine introduced people across the nation and around the world to the plight of the critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal in an article titled "Who Would Kill A Monk Seal?" This species, unique to US waters, has fewer than 1,100 individuals left and is one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world, yet it faces mounting challenges to its recovery. Not only is the Hawaiian monk seal recovery program receiving severe budget cuts, but seals are being killed intentionally because of increased human-seal interactions.


The Marine Conservation Institute has been working for several years to save the Hawaiian monk seal. We recently launched a project led by local Hawaiians to help the local Hawaiian community understand concerns about the monk seal, provide accurate information, and develop a sense of coexistence. Marine Conservation Institute shares selected excerpts from the New York Times Magazine article. Please contact the Marine Conservation Institute if you have any questions on the monk seal recovery effort.

Who Would Kill A Monk Seal?
May 8, 2013, by Jon Mooallem in The New York Times Magazine
Exerpts from "Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?" For the whole article please go here and also look for it in this Sunday's print edition. 


Source: New York Times Magazine




"But the seals' appearance has not been universally appreciated. The animals have been met by many islanders with a convoluted mix of resentment and spite. This fury has led to what the government is calling a string of "suspicious deaths." But spend a little time in Hawaii, and you come to recognize these deaths for what they are - something loaded and forbidding. A word that came to my mind was "assassination." 




Killing an endangered species in Hawaii is both a state and federal offense. Quickly, the State of Hawaii and the Humane Society of the United States put up a reward for information. "We're all in agreement that somebody knows who did this," one Humane Society official told me. The islands are close-knit but also loyal, particularly the native Hawaiian communities. In January, when I met with the state wildlife agency's chief law-enforcement officer for Kauai - a man named Bully Mission - he confessed that, after a year, Kauai's tip line hadn't received a single call. In fact, there was still a reward out from a seal killing in 2009."





In North Carolina, for example, hundreds of brown pelicans have recently been washing ashore dead with broken wings. The birds, nearly wiped out by DDT in the 1970s, are now plentiful and often become semi-tame; they're known to land on fishing boats and swipe at the catch. One theory is that irritated fishermen are simply reaching out and cracking their wings in half with their hands. In March, in Florida, someone shoved a pelican's head through a beer can.




Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act 40 years ago, so much wildlife conservation has been defensive at its core, striving only to keep animals from disappearing forever. But now that we've recovered many of those species, we don't quite know how to coexist with them. We suddenly remember why many of us didn't want them around in the first place. Gray wolves, sandhill cranes, sea otters: species like these, once nearly exterminated, are now rising up to cause ranchers, farmers and fishermen some of the same frustrations all over again. These animals can feel like illegitimate parts of the landscape to people who, for generations, have lived without any of them around - for whom their absence seems, in a word, natural. As Holly Doremus, an environmental legal scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, writes, America has saved so much without ever asking "how much wild nature society needs, and how much society can accept."


The monk seal is not one of these success stories. The species, as a whole, is still slipping toward extinction. But the situation in Hawaii follows the same script: there used to be zero monk seals living around the main Hawaiian islands; there are now between 150 and 200. And I heard story after story from fishermen about seals stealing fish from their nets or hooks, or lurking at favorite fishing spots and scaring away everything else. A lot of fishing in Hawaii is done for subsistence - a way for working-class people to eat better food than they can afford to buy. The monk seals are perceived as direct competition, or at least an unnecessary inconvenience. "They're troublemakers," a young spear fisherman told me one morning at Kauai's Port Allen pier."



"In Hawaii, so many circumstances had knotted together to snare this species."




To view the original article on the New York Times website go here.