A photo was released
on Monday of a poor Hawaiian monk seal, squinting despairingly, with a
probably-also-distressed eel stuck up its nose.
This phenomenon, eels
getting stuck in seals' noses, is rare; the team has observed only three or
four cases of eel-nose in the past four decades, said Charles Littnan, a monk
seal conservation biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Fisheries. But weirdly, the incidence has been increasing
in the past couple of years. "In almost 40 years of monitoring, we have
actually never observed this until a few years ago," Littnan said.
As to how the eel gets
stuck, Littnan has several ideas. The monk seals feed on or near the bottom of
the ocean, because they're "very efficient" and "don't like to
chase things in the water," he said. So, they go for the food, like eels,
whose strategy is to hide.
Monk seals nose around in
coral reefs, root around in the sand to grab hiding octopuses and other
creatures. While the unfortunate, recently photographed seal was doing this, an
eel could have, in a case of self-defense, "rammed itself into the nostril
and maybe got stuck," Littnan said. Since this phenomenon has been
observed only in juvenile seals, Littnan said it could also just be that the
seals are inexperienced at hunting.
Hawaiian monk seals are
among the most endangered seals on the planet, with only about 1,400 of them
living in Hawaii. But recent years have shown "encouraging
developments," according to NOAA Fisheries.