The Monk Seal Chronicles: Mimi and the “Monk Seal Matriarchs”

The Monk Seal Chronicles

Welcome to the NOAA Fisheries Podcast

Angela Amlin: Aloha! I’m Angela Amlin

Michelle Barbieri: And I’m Michelle Barbieri

AA: And welcome to The Monk Seal Chronicles!

Some of you might be familiar with The Pōhaku Chronicles, which was a short podcast series that we put together chronicling the struggles that an adult female monk seal here on Oʻahu had with the disease toxoplasmosis. That was a sometimes difficult podcast to put together, but it was a really rewarding experience, and we got a lot of really good feedback from you guys that you enjoyed the format, and so we wanted to continue on with that in a broader scope addressing some more issues, talking about more seals, and more topics that you folks said you were interested in. And so we're kicking off today with talking about some of our main Hawaiian Islands matriarchs!

MB: Yeah, Angela, I’m excited to be back with you and doing a new podcast. It’s been quite a while since we wrapped up the Pōhaku Chronicles. One of the things about Pōhaku that, I guess is a similar thread to what we want to talk about today, is that she was a really important adult female that we knew in the main Hawaiian Islands population. We wanted to focus this particular podcast on some of those adult females that we kind of think about as the pinniped matriarchs here in the main Islands. We’re getting to a point now where some of the monk seals have been hanging around down here for a few decades; and some of them we have known, and the communities around them have known for many years. They’re a part of our science, they’re a part of the community in many ways, and we really wanted to honor, and take some time to talk story about those seals. So it’s an honor and great excitement to have a special guest today that is another addition to the podcast!

Our special guest today is Mimi Olry. Mimi serves as the Kauaʻi Marine Mammal Response Field Coordinator for the Department of Land and Natural Resources Protected Species program. We work really closely with Mimi and her colleague, Jamie Thomton, who works for NOAA Fisheries as well, and is the program coordinator on Kauai. As a team with an incredible network of volunteers, Jamie and Mimi, you guys respond to Hawaiian monk seals, cetaceans, large whale, sea turtle strandings, just about everything. Overseeing pupping events for monk seals, collecting lots of scientific data, and assisting in other research projects. On top of that, Jamie and Mimi also provide education, outreach, and develop community support for the conservation of all of these protected marine species that we are here to talk about, including monk seals. Mimi has a BS in Biological Sciences from Cal Poly, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of California at Davis, so Mimi and I share that in common, we went to the same vet school. It’s just a real pleasure to have Mimi here today to talk, so I’m going to launch this over to her. Mimi, can you tell us about your first experiences with monk seals in the main Hawaiian Islands?

MO: Hi! Thank you for having me. Yeah, I just, you know, going through COVID right now it's a tough time and COVID shrunk our lives down so we don't have quite the experiences that we usually have. Also many of us have lost relationships because of COVID. But just thinking about stories, I just was reflecting on the fact that our lives are really made up of stories of experiences and relationships that are interwoven through our lives. So I just wanted to talk about monk seals in my life, and when I grew up here they were pretty unknown. I had never seen any throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it wasn't until 1990 when I returned to Kauaʻi after backpacking and working through two years of traveling through Africa, which was my lifelong dream. My parents met in Africa, so I always wanted to go see African wildlife doing a stint of veterinary work after college, and I needed to return home to apply for a work visa to work in Zimbabwe, and of course after two years I wanted to see my family.

So I was glad to see my brother who was still home, and he was my scuba diving buddy. He and I enjoyed camping and horseback riding together quite a bit. So I spent a couple weeks with him and then he went off to Humboldt to finish his degree in marine biology but, sadly, was killed in a car accident. That really threw my life into chaos, and my family as well. After a few months of just trying to get stabilized, I went up to Shipwrecks, to the cliffs. That's where my brother and I used to go and watch the sunrises together. I went up there to say goodbye to him because I was returning to San Diego to the veterinary clinic I had worked before. So I was up there just enjoying the sunrise and the pink hues. I looked down on the beach from above, and there, coming out of the surf, in the pink light, I could see two monk seals hauling out together. Of course, for a first time sighting, it was magical to me. But also that it was two animals, there was something comforting about it. It kind of gave me a sense that God knew what I had been going through with my loss of my brother and the grief, but it also gave me hope to trust in my dreams again, to go forward once more as I was leaving Kauaʻi.

Well, thirteen years later after moving around the west coast working, I got the offer to work with the Orangutan Foundation in Borneo so I came home to Kauaʻi for a break and to see family once more. I ended up volunteering with a friend who invited me to do the first shift of pup sitting because we had a new monk seal pup born at Poʻipu. I really enjoyed that, but decided to continue on to Borneo. Half a year later, after realizing I didn't want to be so far away, I was thrilled to get a position working as the monk seal coordinator on Kauaʻi. That was a pretty amazing turn around for me to be able to do that. When I started, there were only 35 known monk seals to Kauaʻi. Shawn Farry, who was the NOAA Biologist that came out in the early 2000’s, he started a number system with the letter “K” that stood for Kauai, and gave a number. So when I started I had K01, K02, K13, K35, so multiple seals that I would see here and there and identify them. My job was to track them and build up a volunteer network to help me with that work, and then also to respond to these animals when they were in trouble. Even today, we have two new females that have shown up in 2021, and typically the new seals that show up here are from Niʻihau, and so we continue to add to our numbers for Kauaʻi as time goes on. In fact, we have, in the last 16 years that I’ve done this work, we’ve identified 67 individuals. And that’s by scar marks or bleach marks or various markings on them that they show up with, or we’ll apply bleach marks to help resight these animals, and eventually we tag them. So among these were adult females as well and those are the matriarchs that we’re going to talk about today.

MB: Thanks Mimi, I'm really interested to hear more about some of the seals that stick out the most in your 16 years of experience in working with monk seals. I think that it's a good time to also interject that one of the reasons we value these females - in addition to getting to know them as individual seals and the stories that we learn about from them - it's also from a recovery standpoint, the females are the ones that really make a difference in terms of how we help sustain the species. So we focus efforts and prioritize those females because they’re the reproductive potential for the future. So Mimi, tell us about one of the seals, maybe it's a “K” seal, that comes to mind for you that can help our listeners understand why we hold these pinniped matriarchs in such high regards.

MO: Sure, I’d love to tell you about one of my favorites. She was quite remarkable, and her name was K30. She had many many scars on her, unusual scars that we don't see on a lot of seals, but the most remarkable one was that she had this deep indentation around her neck, most likely from marine debris that she had gotten her head stuck into probably as a young animal that was growing. It caused a deep wound, eventually she was able to free herself and it left a deep scar that encircled her neck. What also was notable, and when Shawn found her and gave her her K30 number, she was a four year old, a subadult, and she was at Miloliʻi, that's a beach out on the Napali. You have to get there only by boat. We got a call…well, backtracking, Shawn had also noted, but he wasn’t able to see, that she had a large wound on one side that she was laying on. He was concerned that it was a shark bite wound. Later on we would find out that she did have a large shark bite wound on her side as well, that may have been coinciding when she was entangled in marine debris, that a shark bit her.

Anyway, it was in 2005 when I started this job, we got an emergency report of a monk seal that had fishing line cutting into the neck. The seal was out at Miloliʻi, and this was the July 4th weekend. I notified the NOAA biologist and they put together a veterinary team and field biologists to capture her and to see if we could disentangle her, because of course something around the neck was going to be likely threatening. So we ended up going out with the navy, they provided us with some rigid hulled Zodiacs to go out there to get to Miloliʻi. It was quite an adventure! K30 was laying, sleeping soundly on the beach, and to get to Miloliʻi it's a swim in through the channel because the boats can't get in too close, and the surf is often rough out there. So we all swam into the beach with our equipment. We got up to K30 who was quite leery and quite alert. The plan was to net her and to check the neck wound to see if there was indeed fishing line or debris that needed to be removed.

K30 was a large seal at that point, five years old, and she was not going to have anything to do with us. She was quite strong and she would push the net off and turn around and circle around us. In the time that we pursued her to try to capture her, Dr. Bob Braun was able to visualize her neck and get a good sense that it was not fishing debris, but it was in fact a deep scar that was around her neck. So we realized she was fine. She didn't look like she had been suffering at all and she was in good body condition. So we decided that we had done enough of an investigation and that she was not going to need any intervention. Anyway, in that time though, she went into the ocean and swam back and forth on the coastline. This was the first time we were going to learn about K30’s…I don't want to say exactly personality, but she had a bit of an attitude, that if you disturbed her, she usually wasn't too happy about that! She wouldn't flee, she would rather stand her ground, so she swam back and forth along the coastline and we could not swim out to the boat to leave the beach because she would give us stink eye and we, with a large seal, were not wanting, in her element in the water, to tangle with her. So she made us stay there for about an hour until she decided to leave, and then we could safely swim out to the boat. So that stands out in my mind quite clearly that K30 was an unusual seal!

MB: It’s really something about these some of these females that we've gotten to know, especially when we feel that there is a really important need to intervene. Another one here on Oahu I think that comes to mind, R5AY. She was a similarly well-known mom around Oahu. She ended up needing a lot of real hands-on intervention at one point because of an interaction with fishing line and hooks, and we ended up having to bring her in and amputate a good section of her tongue, not really ever being sure if she was going to be able to feed on her own again. Ultimately, she absolutely was, but those days that she was here in our care, we got a sense of that attitude that you're talking about with K30 too! Because that disposition that they have, some of these seals never cease to amaze me as how tough they are, and what they can really get through. They're just so amazing in their ability to heal and deal with adversity, and then they do all that and then have pups, like, every year! As a mom, that still just baffles me how they can do all of that! It's gonna be hard as we start to see some of these seals leave the population too.
You know we, unfortunately, have had to say goodbye to R5AY and RK30. I think those were, over the last couple of years, some of the first ones we’ve really had to say goodbye to in that way. It’s going to be hard as that continues. We really are in a unique position where we’ve just know these seals for so long, we haven't had monk seals in our midst in this way here in the main Hawaiian Islands to have, I guess, to see the sunset of some of that. So it's a sad thing to think about and I think that's really why we wanted to take some time to honor those individuals.

AA: Some of the folks listening might have actually caught a glimpse of some of that RK30 toughness and resilience that you’re talking about. It was a somewhat unfortunate incident a few years back in 2016, but RK30 was in the news and so folks around the state and probably even on the mainland may know her a little bit. Mimi, do you mind talking a little bit about that incident that occurred back, about five years ago?

MO: Yes. Talk about resilience! RK30, in the time we've been with her, she's had eleven pups. In 2016, she was pregnant again and she happened to be at Salt Ponds, just resting on the beach. It got towards evening, and there was some partying going on on the beach. Just, you know, regular get-togethers, and apparently some individual had probably had too much to drink or whatever and decided he didn’t want her on the beach. So he decided he was going to chase her off the beach, I think with his rubber slipper or something, not knowing that K30 is not an easy one to displace off the beach! I mean there was times when Jamie and I had to displace her off boat ramps or even there at Salt Ponds because there's a road below the airport, and she’d be pretty defiant! Even with our crowding boards she wouldn't move easily and she would bark at us, and take her time to come off the beach. We had to pursue her because she was in a place that was not safe for her. Anyway this individual, with his rubber slipper, or whatever he had, decided to go after her and hit her with that. Well, she woke up and she just let him know that that was not going to be acceptable and fought back! She did probably, from the reports, did leave the beach, but many people that observed that were not happy. They knew she was pregnant, and you know, here in the islands, mothers are respected. She was quite pregnant and it was obvious that she was going to have a pup, and so people that saw that quickly came to her rescue and called the police. So the young gentleman was arrested eventually, and tried in court. And K30 did go on two days later to pup at Miloliʻi beach again. So she, again resilient, and able to produce another pup in spite of her accident that she had there.

MB: Mimi do you know off the top of your head how many pups RK30 had in her time?

MO: Yes, she had eleven pups. That brings up again what a great mother she was. She was resilient, tough, and she would pup at different locations. I think it was 2009 she pupped along Kīpū Kai on a rough coastline. And then she pupped on the Northeast shore, but Miloliʻi was her most favorite place to pup on the Napali, which gets a lot of surf in the winter time. She had a pup, I don't remember, I think it was 2011, that DLNR had Alan Friedlander out on the coast there looking at an archaeological site. There was old remains of a hale at Miloliʻi beach, and they observed her giving birth, which is really rare because most of the time seals pup during the night and we don't get to see the birth happen. But they watched her give birth right there on the beach. Unfortunately, a large wave, a sneaker wave, just washed the pup out to sea. She called for it, which is typical for our moms when their pups are away from them and they get separated. She went into the surf and Alan took photos of this as well as…I don't remember the name of the other gentleman with him, and he said that she was able to get the pup back on the beach. Unfortunately, another wave took it out. Sadly, she searched for that pup and called for that pup for a couple hours and then realized it was lost. So that was one of the pups that she didn't bring into adulthood. But yeah, she had eleven pups all together, that we know of.

MB: Thanks, Mimi, that's pretty amazing to have seals that have given birth to so many pups in their lifetime and I know that the years in their twenties, you know that reproductive output tends to wane. We recognize that that’s something to be expected, but it's just so cool to see them pupping through so many years of their lives. I think that one of the things that we know from the population as a whole is they tend to live until their twenties and in rare cases close to thirty years old. How old was K30, do we know?

MO: I’m trying to do the math in my head…so in 2004 she was about four, so what does that make her? She was in her twenties, so yeah.

AA: Michelle, going back to something you mentioned earlier, you said that we said goodbye to RK30, can you talk a little bit about what we noticed toward the end of her life and how that might apply to some of these older females here, these matriarchs, in the main Hawaiian Islands?

MB: Yea, that's a great question, Angela, one that we worked really hard on when RK30 was showing us signs of weight loss and was starting to give us some clues that she was at the end of her life. We know that—while these seals are incredibly important for so many of the stories that we heard about so far today, and the reasons for which we know them and know how they’ve contributed to the species—we have to approach this objectively as well and make the best decisions for animal welfare. About how and when we respond and what we do or choose not to do in terms of letting nature take its course.

RK30 toward the end of her life, when Mimi and Jamie were communicating with us about her, I flew over, and went over and observed her as well. She was lethargic, she was doing some behavior that we can refer to as logging, and it seemed as though, to intervene, had us asking, you know, to what end do we do that? And what are the endpoints that we’re expecting to get from that? And the stress that it would have had on her. Those are some of the really difficult things that we have to face and unfortunately may face with a handful of other females sometime in the next few years that are in their twenties now, as we see this generation pass on. We decided that the most respectful thing was to allow nature to take it’s course for her. Because even trying to do something like capturing and humanely euthanizing her would have probably created a whole lot more stress on her than what was really necessary. So we know that RK30 passed, and we’re now looking a little bit more carefully at another of those “K” seals on Kauai. Jamie, Mimi, and I and a whole variety of the team have been talking about RK13. So Mimi, I don't know if you want to talk a little about her.

MO: Yeah, RK13’s another favorite. She's blind in her left eye, it looks like, you know, years ago she had some wounds like a moray eel may have bitten her eye. But she’s done well over the years and produced pups as K30 did. She is our east side seal so our volunteers Mary and Lloyd Miyashiro, our volunteer leads, know her real well and observed her over the years, and helped with her pup sitting. She showed up a couple of months ago with some wounds on her right fore flipper and she wasn’t using it, and the lacerations and punctures suggested maybe a dog bite wound. We observed her, and she started to lose some weight, and with opportunity to give her antibiotics with a jab pole, we were able to do that, and hopefully turn her around from any infection that might have ensued from her wounds there. But we are seeing as she reappears along the coastline that she is losing weight, and losing ground, so she may also be reaching the end of her life as well. We’ll just take it one day at a time, and our volunteers realize this as well. It will be hard to say goodbye to her, ‘cause a lot of memories are wrapped up with her.

AA: I think it's important to note that, while it's hard to say goodbye so some of these older females—especially because there are so many stories that we, and so many volunteers and members of the community, have about them, and they've contributed so many pups that are just a big part of the community, and important in the monk seal population—these are not going to be deaths where we have a conclusion, like you might see a lot in the news, you might hear, you know, such-and-such seal died of this. And that might feel more satisfactory because you have an answer, but this is actually better because, you know, this is ideal - these are seals that have lived out their whole life, they lived it naturally, they're passing on of old age. And while it feels a little more open-ended, it is really a success story and contributing to the recovery of their species because they have managed to make it for the full life span of a monk seal.

MB: Well, thank you Mimi so much for sharing the stories that you have to share of seals on Kauai that you’ve come to know over all these years and for everything that you do on the ground everyday to facilitate their care. I think we’ve really learned a lot today and it's been just such a good opportunity to share some stories and acknowledge that connection that people have with these individual animals and also make it a point to note that approaching seals is not a good idea! Especially in the case of some of these seals with attitude, but across the board it's really important to give them their space and I really appreciate you being here with us today. Thank you so much.