Monk Seals

On the beach, the ordinary-extraordinary. Just the other day, a Hawaiian monk seal hauled out. Laboriously hefting—inchworming—its bulk on the sand, evoking Slinky toys on the staircases of my childhood. This seal, around seven feet in length, some four or five hundred pounds, was soon sunbathing as it dozed.

In the ocean, able to move at twenty miles an hour and dive hundreds of feet, monk seals feed on fish, lobster, octopus, squid, and eels. Big fish, little fish: seals are food for tiger and Galapagos sharks.

Some humans, seeing terrestrial life as no worse than difficult despite genocides and wars, argue aquatic life must be nightmarish. Which to them explains those marine creatures that first made their way onto terra firma. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, however, one fisherman marvels “how fishes live in the sea,” the other pointing out that “as man do a-land, the great ones eat up the little ones.”

In these islands, in any case, among the last places on earth reached by Homo sapiens, seals had no land predators. With the arrival of Polynesians, however, seals in the inhabited main islands were killed off. And then, in the nineteenth century, Europeans hunted them throughout the archipelago. Hunted them to the brink of extinction.

Hence “endangered.” In common usage, the word becomes a verbal tic, as if the Hawaiian monk seal’s first name is Endangered. It’s also euphemistic: human agency kept silent like the k in knew, w in wrong. God didn’t endanger the Hawaiian monk seal. Nor did erupting volcanoes, meteorites, or any of the two-by-twos Noah loaded on board. So who in God’s name was responsible for this “near extinction”? Think back to third grade, circa 1952, teacher balefully surveying the classroom to determine which boy made the fart sound. Giggling kids gone mute, hyper-angelic. Weak criminal soon to confess.

Endangered. Of course, agency doesn’t mean there had to be a moral dimension—that is, intent. At least, not till recently. But now, now, now we get it. Dinosaurs long gone, on land we’re the alpha predator: what other species could imagine nuclear war, build nuclear weapons, use them? And though ships still sink and people still drown, at sea too we’re the alpha predator. Whitehead and Rendell write that although “until very recently human impact on the oceans was restricted to waters just off the coasts . . . now we, and our effects, are everywhere.”

I know: try conveying that to my surf buddies still out at nightfall, apprehensive about shark attacks, hearing footsteps. Having again caught a wave, carried back to the break on a river mouth’s fresh-water linear escalator. Conservation of energy, less paddling, but every surfer has heard waterman wisdom about sharks feeding at dusk. Nor can surfers miss spotting the garbage or carcasses floating downstream. Which attract bait fish, which attract . . . well, cue the soundtrack from Jaws.

On the other hand, marine biologists estimate that, worldwide, one hundred million sharks are killed annually by humans. Or might it be two hundred and fifty million? Tens of millions, for sure, for every human killed by a shark. Perhaps six human deaths a year, worldwide, in some eighty attacks.

Do the math, though for the surfer out as night falls, math brings no peace of mind. Nor is the surfer likely to assuage apprehension by admiring a family of creatures that thrived for eons before dinosaurs appeared, that has survived for hundreds of millions of years, or by learning individual sharks can live hundreds of years.

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But about these endangered, not to mention “conservation reliant,” monk seals. For the first time in memory, a monk seal gave birth on a popular beach, just down the shore. Right there, in front of a hotel’s beachside restaurant and a condo’s parking garage. As if oblivious to human proximity. What followed were forty-three days of monk seal and pup. And, daily, media coverage, hundreds of humans coming each day to see the duo, photographing, gaping. Dedicated conservation volunteers doing their best to keep our gods’ chosen species at a distance.

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