The Odyssey of KP2 Read online

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  KP2’S STRUGGLES had been witnessed by a group of islanders who were well aware of RK22’s maternal incompetence. Shadowed beneath hats and hidden behind the tropical vegetation, they tried to blend into the background as they watched with binoculars so as not to disturb the mother and her new pup. The previous June, less than a hundred feet from the bloodstained sand that marked KP2’s birthplace, this same group had witnessed the entry of his sister into the world.

  To these members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Kauai Monk Seal Team, this adult female seal was notorious for bad behavior and bad mothering. She had been just as unresponsive to the cries of KP2’s sister. The year before, the team had waited three days before they could no longer stand to watch idly as the tiny female pup slowly, helplessly starved to death on the beach. Taking pity on the abandoned pup, they finally picked her up.

  For days the dedicated team tried valiantly to reunite KP2’s sister with her mother by moving the crying pup directly in front of RK22’s sunbathing spot. But RK22 would have none of it. Instead she snoozed in the sun, ignoring the persistent calls of her pup. When the newborn seal became too loud, her mother entered the water for a swim and in a single dive drowned out the sound of her starving offspring.

  Finally admitting defeat in the face of RK22’s indifference, one of the team members called in a veterinarian, who humanely euthanized the weak and emaciated pup. KP2’s sister lived for only five days.

  Determined not to let KP2 suffer the same fate, the Kauai team called the marine mammal stranding headquarters on the neighboring island of Oahu. David Schofield of the National Marine Fisheries Service Pacific Islands Regional Office (NMFS-PIRO) answered. With an office in downtown Honolulu, David maintained an uneasy relationship with the local Hawaiians and at times his upper management. He was the federal official in charge of marine mammal strandings for the islands, and unlike his bosses 4,519 miles away in Washington, D.C., David’s everyday decisions were entangled with cultural sensitivities as well as ocean politics. While Washington bureaucrats could ponder their next moves, David’s job demanded instantaneous life-or-death evaluations for the dolphins, whales, and seals that found their way onto Hawaii’s shores. It was simply impossible to please everyone.

  Having grown up in the shadow of the Trump casinos in Atlantic City, a brusque decision-making attitude came naturally to David. However, his East Coast edge for dealing quickly and independently with stranded animals in Hawaii sometimes chafed island sensitivities. Aloha shirts, a bicep tattoo, and a shared passion for surfing and canoeing the waters of Waikiki notwithstanding, David remained a haole (outsider).

  Issuing a series of rapid-fire phone calls, David dealt with KP2, aware that some of his decisions would not be popular; in these situations it was easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. As a result, less than forty-eight hours after his birth, KP2 was whisked away from his abusive mother, scooped up fireman style by David and another government official, Shawn Farry, from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, or PIFSC, a unit of the National Marine Fisheries Service. David grasped the little seal’s front flippers and Shawn had hold of his back flippers while his thick pink umbilical cord dangled between them. Either man could have easily carried the seal pup, at only thirty-four pounds, under one arm. Instead they gently cradled the stunned seal between them and placed him in a dog kennel.

  A quick inspection of KP2 showed that he was no worse for wear despite his postpartum ordeal on the beach. He had been roughed up but there was no evidence of open bite wounds. From what David and Shawn could see, KP2 was a robust, healthy monk seal pup. “So why,” they asked each other, “did RK22 abandon him?”

  Nature’s law dictating survival of the fittest initially seemed the most likely explanation. Because the metabolic cost of pregnancy is low compared to lactation, many mammals (including those that live in the sea) are known for carrying fetuses to term only to abandon them at the moment of birth. Reasons for this seemingly wasteful behavior vary. Sometimes mothers recognize that their newborns are ill or otherwise deformed. Other times mothers know that local food resources are insufficient for sustaining both their own caloric needs and those of their young. Nature dictates that, above all else, you save yourself. This is the harsh biological reality for wild mothers caught in rapidly degrading habitats: cut your losses and focus efforts on the hope of guaranteeing the survival of next year’s healthy offspring.

  But the pup in question was not ill, nor had RK22 disappeared to forage elsewhere. KP2’s mother simply appeared to prefer male companionship to motherhood. Consequently, her offspring had been left to find their own path to survival.

  David and Shawn now faced the most difficult decision encountered by a biologist. They could let nature run its course, or they could intervene. With so few Hawaiian monk seals left in the world, the decision was obvious. They chose to intervene, and in a remarkable turn of events KP2 was given a second chance at life.

  • • •

  AT THE NEARBY LIHUE AIRPORT, a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 transporter waited next to a line of palm trees. David Schofield had arranged a deal for the pup to hitch a free ride on the aircraft as it returned to Oahu. The C-130’s engines roared in anticipation of takeoff as the vehicle containing KP2 and his rescuers sped across the tarmac. The seal stuck his nose through the grating and peered through the small holes of the kennel. He had no perception of what the normal sights, sounds, and smells of a monk seal’s life should be. However, despite the noise and urgency surrounding him, there was some comfort in not being mauled or abused by one of his own.

  With a vibrating roar of propellers, the seal pup left behind his mother to her brutish male companion in the turquoise waters of Kauai. It was an unprecedented act instigated by a bad mother, organized by a brash ex–New Jerseyan, and executed by the generosity of the U.S. Coast Guard.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY, THE LITTLE BLACK PUP who’d been abandoned on a lonely Kauai beach would become an icon, a rogue, and a threat. Unbeknownst to RK22, the survival of her entire species would one day come to rest on her offspring’s small and once discarded shoulders.

  2.

  Explorations

  Eight of us were on the verge of wholesale cabin fever holed up in McMurdo Station, Antarctica, eight hundred miles from the South Pole, as the coldest September on record chilled our Weddell seal expedition to an icy halt. Although I had weathered seven expeditions to the frozen continent, September 2009 was by far the most brutal. At −70°F, the conditions outdoors were life-threatening. Winds forced the thermometer to −100°F, and nothing moved. The oil in our snow machines had long frozen to the viscosity of mud, while the moisture from our breath stuck to our eyelashes and froze our eyes shut.

  My team was slowly recovering from the fallout of a close call on the sea ice. Four of us had been caught in a whiteout while trying to locate Shaquille O’Seal. The Weddell seal had been missing for weeks, hiding beneath snow-bridged cracks and leading us on a wild chase across McMurdo Sound. All of the seals we were studying had taken shelter in the comparatively warm waters below the sea ice. Unable to follow, we were left shivering in the wind and blowing snow, marveling at how the slushy 27°F ice water steamed like a thermal spa in the seals’ disappearing wake.

  Shaquille was one of several seals each carrying over $50,000 of scientific instrumentation from the National Science Foundation in a backpack. A miniature video camera and computerized sensors in his pack were designed to record the intimate details of his underwater exploits. Through the instrumentation we were able to dive virtually into the Weddell seal’s icy world. We monitored every swimming stroke and beat of their hearts as the seals descended to extraordinary depths. Sometimes this meant distances of more than a third of a mile from a breathing hole on the icy surface to the benthic zone, the darkest bottom of the ocean. In the c
old and dark and under intense hydrostatic pressures, these master divers stalked giant four-foot Antarctic cod. Through our miniature instruments, my expedition members and I were privileged to have a ringside seat as predator and prey fought for survival in the harshest environment on earth.

  Our diving seals had revealed incredible polar sights never before witnessed by human divers, from secret ice passages beneath coastal glaciers to gardens composed of alien-looking plants growing five hundred meters below the sea ice. Many expeditions before ours had explored the surface of Antarctica; we thrilled to the discovery of what happened below the ice.

  The instrumented seals in our study were free to swim and dive throughout McMurdo Sound. Usually, after a week of hunting, the seals hauled out on top of the ice to rest, giving my team the opportunity to retrieve the backpack and all of our data. But the onset of foul weather had altered Shaquille O’Seal’s pattern, causing the seal to swim off with our instruments and our science. Weeks passed without a sighting, leaving my expedition members anxious and on edge.

  Bone-chilling surveys on snowmobiles crisscrossing the sea ice in the hope of spotting a sign from the seal left all of us nearly hypothermic. We wrenched spines and snow machines on the rough sastrugi covering the frozen landscape. When we turned to high tech by listening for radio and satellite signals from the tags on Shaquille’s backpack, we were continually disappointed. The radio receivers remained ominously silent. Our computers never woke to a satellite hit.

  After nearly a month of waiting, I feared the worst for the missing seal and our instruments. We needed a new plan. I sought out Traci Kendall and Beau Richter, two marine mammal trainers at the heart of my lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Following in the footsteps of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, who employed animal handlers on his 1914 trans-Antarctic Endurance expedition, I found the addition of people experienced in animal behavior invaluable on my research team. Importantly, Beau, Traci, and I shared the gift of being able to read animals. Each of us, in different ways, was driven to use that ability to help preserve the wild animals of the land and seas.

  The previous year Traci had been my expedition animal handler and demonstrated a remarkable calming influence on wild Weddell seals. Despite standing at only five foot three in insulated Bunny boots, she had no fear walking up to enormous male seals that were seven times her weight. The giant seals would rear up, snap their jaws threateningly, and try to roll away. The trainer always stood her ground and never flinched. Instead, by moving slowly and always letting the seal know where she was—much like she would act around a skittish horse—Traci calmed the seals to the point that the rest of us could deploy and remove our instrumentation with ease. This year it was Beau’s turn as the animal handler on ice, while Traci stayed at home to take care of our dogs and the animals in my lab.

  Traci agreed with Beau and me—over a very long-distance phone call—about how we should handle the search for Shaquille. We needed to understand the internal pressures and the instinctual biological drivers that defined his species. Rather than just the challenges we faced as humans in Antarctica, we also had to consider the external pressures—the combination of weather, habitat, and seal society—that comprised the environment in which the seal competed in order to survive. By seeing the world through Shaquille’s eyes, we could understand the seal’s decisions and anticipate his movements. Only then would we find him.

  After consulting with Beau and Traci, I came to the conclusion that from Shaquille’s perspective the world was all about size and breathing space. He was exceptionally broad in the shoulders, and had used his brawn to his advantage in finding mates. As one of the largest seals, he could afford to be stubborn, curious, and lazy, as few dared to challenge him due to the confidence of mass. He bossed around the local females and younger males without compunction.

  But there was a handicap inherent in this top seal position. Shaquille was so bulky that he could not fit his body through the small cracks and holes in the sea ice used by the smaller seals to breathe and escape the water. Like all Weddell seals, he could hold his breath for over an hour; any longer and he had to find a hole in the ice to grab a breath of air before he drowned. Sooner or later—preferably before twenty-three minutes, at which point he would begin to feel the fatiguing burn of lactic acid in his muscles—he had to surface to breathe.

  Severe weather had trapped the massive Shaquille below the ice by freezing over the open water leads that the seals used during the summer to surface and breathe. With few options remaining, we knew that Shaq had to be nearby, floating below one of the tidal cracks to catch his breath. Smaller male and female seals could squeeze periodically through these rare breathing holes and tidal cracks. Hauling out on top of the frozen sea, they basked in the warmth of the rising late winter sun, even if its thin rays were available for only a few hours each day. There was no such reprieve for Shaquille. The seal had resigned himself to staying underwater, too lazy to use his sharp canine teeth to widen breathing holes, or perhaps too savvy to waste his time on such a formidable task. Instead, he muscled his way into another seal’s breathing spot. By poking his big snout through the ice opening, he inhaled and exhaled below the ice, huffing for hours where neither the weather nor our team could reach him.

  His strategy worked, except for one nagging problem. There was an entire colony of displaced seals holding their breath below him. With lungs near bursting, the submerged seals eventually bit at Shaquille’s dangling flippers and forced him out of their way so they could snatch a quick breath of much-needed air.

  Based on our assessment of Shaquille’s personality and predicament, there was a good chance that we would be waiting a long, long time before he was motivated to move. Something had to change.

  “We need a sucker hole,” I concluded. “What if we created a breathing hole so big and so attractive that even a big, lazy, territorial seal like Shaq would find it too irresistible not to haul out?”

  Beau and Traci agreed, and I presented the idea to the rest of the expedition members. Although skeptical at first, the others warmed to the idea more out of boredom than for its brilliance. The next day we used a four-foot-wide augur to drill a hole though nine feet of solid sea ice in one of Shaquille’s favorite hangouts. To make it even easier for the half-ton seal, Beau and I made a series of ice stairs by chipping away the edges of the hole with an ice ax. The rotund seal could slide effortlessly out of our custom-designed breathing hole with little more energy than rolling over.

  We didn’t have to wait long. In less than twenty-four hours, curiosity got the better of Shaquille O’Seal and we were ready for him. Four of us watched from a distance as our missing seal poked his whiskered muzzle through the slushy ice water. Steam rose several feet above his exposed nostrils, and seawater instantly froze on his whiskers and eyebrows. Surveying the horizon with a 360 degree piroutte in the hole, Shaquille seemed perplexed by the luck of finding such an oasis in the sea ice. Using our icy exit steps, the seal flopped his chest and then his belly forward, hauling his blubbery body out into the open.

  “Come on,” I whispered under my breath as Beau and two others watched intently with binoculars. We were hidden by snowmobiles several hundred feet away. No one stirred.

  “Not yet,” Beau cautioned. If we moved too quickly, Shaquille would slip backward into the water before we could reach him. We held our steaming breaths, waiting for Shaquille’s back flipper tips to clear the water. The seal inched another several feet forward. We had him.

  “Now!” Beau instructed. The group jumped into action on the snowmobiles. With practiced skill, we positioned our vehicles between the seal and the sucker hole. Using the same calming head and eye cover technique as Traci’s, Beau soon had the seal quietly lying on his stomach. Before Shaquille had time to raise a flipper in protest, we had his instrument backpack detached.

  I smiled at our good fortune as we packed
the snowmobiles to leave. The large Weddell seal had already turned over to go back to sleep. Clearly, we were a minor disturbance in Shaq’s day compared to the flipper-biting seals he had endured for weeks. I noticed that the sea ice was stained pink with Shaquille’s blood from the injuries the other seals had inflicted. As a result of his obstinacy, the huge seal’s hind flippers had taken on the same ragged appearance as the wind-torn flags that lined our snowmobile trails on the sea ice. We had done him a great favor by creating the giant hole in the ice. I also realized, however, that in picking that moment for his return, my companions and I had made a potentially fatal error.

  “The wind’s come up!” I cursed as I looked down at my boots. Although our science was saved, my team had momentarily ignored its own survival. With all of us focused on catching Shaquille, we had missed the telltale drift of sugary ground snow swirling around our heavy, insulated boots. We had also ignored the rising of a South Pole wind that now whistled through our parkas. Suddenly four of us were blinded, stopped dead in our tracks as a wall of snow enveloped our field party.

  A charging wind rushed unchallenged across the sea ice where we stood, with gusts of seventy-five miles an hour overtaking us. The rush of snow deafened and muted our team. Every breath was choked with snow. Fine ice crystals shot by each gust cut into our clothes and skin with the viciousness of glass. We were whipped mercilessly by stinging snow for our mistake, and I began to wish that I could follow Shaquille as he slipped back down our sucker hole and into the safety of the calm waters below.

  Despite the ground snow, if I looked straight up I could make out blue sky above us and the tips of the surrounding mountains. A peculiar feature of Antarctic snow is that it usually arrives on the back of the wind rather than falling down from clouds in the sky. Through the gray I could see the volcanic smoking cap of Mount Erebus, and at times the distinctive brown outline of Castle Rock. We had no true horizon, but we did have a direction and a handheld GPS.