MIDWAY’S MONK SEALS

Peter Meisenheimer

International Marine Mammal Association

In my working life I have spent time in some pretty out-of-the-way places – Ungava, Botswana’s Chobe enclave, the middle of Russia’s White Sea (in March). Far off the beaten track, each has its own special magic; none is more remote or unusual than Midway Atoll.

It is also fair to say, I think, that few places would seem less probable a destination for someone in search of seals. But walk along the gleaming beach, or even board a research launch in the concrete encased harbour, and there, among the multitudes of albatrosses, terns, boobies, frigates, petrels, noddies and shearwaters, they are.

Most who are aware of Midway at all, know it as the site of a decisive WW II naval battle between the USA and Japan. Indeed, during my visit last May, Bob Ballard (of Titanic fame) found the American aircraft carrier the Yorktown, sunk in 16,000 feet of water during the battle of Midway, and the whole island turned out for a little celebration on the pier. Crumbling bunkers, rotting buildings, an enormous runway, and a massively superfluous harbour capacity are testament to its former importance as a US military outpost in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

That is the past, however, and Midway is now a National Wildlife Refuge, populated by a unique mix of Fish and Wildlife Service staffers, dive-boat and sport-angling operators, biologists, students, eco-volunteers, tourists and contract support staff from a bunch of Asian and western Pacific countries. Most of the population would fit into the cafeteria in one sitting. As the human presence has dwindled the monk seals have returned. The tenth birth of the 1998 season took place while I was there.

Midway comprises the three islands Eastern, Sand and Spit. These days, all human habitation and most human activity is confined to Sand Island. Only visitors accompanied by Fish and Wildlife staff and officially sanctioned researchers are allowed on Eastern Island and access to tiny Spit Island is even more tightly controlled. As I saw for myself, Fish and Wildlife staff leading twice weekly guided visits to Eastern Island are not shy about discreetly turning an overly boisterous group around and heading them back to the boat ahead of schedule.

I visited under the auspices of a volunteer program organised by the Oceanic Society. I have managed projects that relied on volunteer labour, and I have visited others, so I was aware of the potential pitfalls and possible benefits of such a setup. I was to be part of a research program on the behaviour of a resident spinner dolphin (Stenella longirostris) group, and I had heard bad things about other volunteer "research projects" on dolphin species in other places, so I was wary of what awaited.

As someone who now works full-time in the marine mammal research world, I had also heard mutterings about the proposed use of volunteers to monitor the monk seal population on Midway. I had originally applied to volunteer on that program but had been told that the Oceanic Society was not accepting monk seal volunteers pending resolution of permitting problems.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised. The fellow in charge of the spinner dolphin program is Lescek Karczmarski, a recent PhD graduate who takes his research very seriously. I expect a few volunteers will not be excited by the prospect of sitting in a dark room identifying dolphins from slides, and the 0600 assignments in the observation towers will not be to everyone’s taste. We got to do some real work, and, although we got our share of up-close dolphin observations while working from the boat, this was no swim with dolphins holiday.

We did manage to spend a day with the two volunteers assisting the monk seal team who had been booked in before the decision to put the volunteer program on hold. They actually appeared to be enjoying the scat analysis assigned to them (surely a unique holiday experience by any measure), and seemed to understand and accept why they were not permitted to accompany the research staff on restricted beaches (almost all of them).

At any rate, for those intent on seeing them, there was never any difficulty seeing seals. Even with the prohibition on actively approaching any seal closer than 100 feet, enough of the younger animals were sufficiently unafraid of humans that anyone spending time on or near the water was unlikely to miss the opportunity to have a close look as they approached of their own accord. On both visits to Eastern Island, groups of juveniles congregated around the landing and played around the boat. On days when we were doing boat-based dolphin surveys, we often as not had to manoeuvre around a large female seal who had staked out the launching ramp as her preferred sunbathing spot.

Although there were efforts at one time to introduce monk seals to Midway from elsewhere in their range, the animals that have begun to re-establish the breeding population there have migrated from other islands in the Hawaiian Archipelago – in particular from Pearl and Hermes reefs. The great majority of births have been on Eastern and Spit islands. However, after decades of absence, restriction of access to beaches coupled with the overall reduction in human activity has led to recent celebrations of monk seal births on Sand Island, as well.

Clipper Beach is the one beach on Sand Island which is open to human visitors. It is situated between the end of a runway and the freight pier, and is said to be less favoured for monk seal pupping because its exposure to prevailing trade winds has deepened the approach, making seals vulnerable to attack by tiger sharks. This thought was never far from my mind as I swam there. The island’s claim to culinary fame – a French restaurant run by a couple from Toulouse – is also situated on the dune crest on Clipper Beach, alongside a small bar that is open for sundowners. I will say that the setting is exquisite, and the food equally so, and the single most hilarious moment of my visit involved the reaction of the owners to a Texan visitor sending his sashimi back to be cooked.

The overall impression carried away from Midway was of a fledgling endeavour seeking its feet. The US Fish and Wildlife staff are obviously motivated and thoughtful people attempting to administer a refuge in an extremely remote corner of US territory. Midway is a US possession, but not considered part of the state of Hawaii, and it is necessary to pass through passport control on returning to Honolulu. Given the antipathy for funding new initiatives within the federal US political system – even in areas of the country with local constituents – there was apparently little option for reserve managers than to seek some self-supporting system for administering their work on Midway.

Whether it is possible to operate a reserve for endangered animals like monk seals alongside profit-making sport angling and diving operations remains to be seen. Co-existence appears to be working so far, but it is clear that the level of activity will increase somewhat as the businesses gather momentum. In some respects the more interesting question is whether the US Fish and Wildlife Service will be able to maintain its presence on Midway if the tourist operations turn out to be economically unworkable. In the event that the tourism operations fail to make a go of it with the rules currently governing activities there, it behoves the monk seal conservation community to keep an eye on the situation.