LIHU‘E — Surfrider Foundation Kaua‘i Chapter is offering another $3,000 to anyone who has information leading to the arrest and conviction of April’s Westside monk seal killer. The nonprofit’s goal is to reach $5,000 to match the $5,000 already being
LIHU‘E — Surfrider Foundation Kaua‘i Chapter is offering another $3,000 to anyone who has information leading to the arrest and conviction of April’s Westside monk seal killer.
The nonprofit’s goal is to reach $5,000 to match the $5,000 already being offered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Carl Berg of Surfrider said Wednesday.
RK19 was the 5-year-old subadult male seal discovered dead April 19 at Kaumakani. The otherwise healthy seal was observed alive just a day earlier during the Fisheries Service’s semi-annual Hawaiian monk seal count, according to the Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Since the last reward program was “very successful in that the public offered a large contribution of funds which led to the conviction and jail time” of the North Shore’s monk seal slayer earlier this year, Surfrider was motivated to give it another go, Berg said.
“The other aspect of this is that we really want to impress upon the people of Hawai‘i that these are special animals,” he added. “These are native animals, a part of Hawai‘i that really needs to be protected.”
The monk seal —– ‘ilio-holo-i-ka-uaua, or “the dog that runs in the rough seas” — is sometimes referred to as a “living fossil” because they have essentially remained the same for at least 13 million years, well before the arrival of human beings on the planet and even longer than the Main Hawaiian Islands, according to the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.
The Hawaiian monk seal originally occurred throughout the Hawaiian archipelago and was “likely extirpated from the Main Hawaiian Islands by Polynesian colonizers 1,500 to 1,600 years ago,” a study published in The Journal of Heredity states.
They were susceptible targets for hunting activities which took a toll on their population and upon the arrival of the first European sailors during the 19th century, they “were hunted to near extinction at the six primary Northwestern Hawaiian Islands subpopulation — French Frigate Shoals, Laysan, Lisianski, Pearl and Hermes Reef, Midway Atoll and Kure.”
“It’s not monk seals that are eating the fish, it’s humans,” Surfrider’s Dr. Gordon LaBedz said Thursday.
There are almost 7 billion people on the planet and only around 1,100 of these seals left; they hardly serve as competition, he said. Killing them will not help matters, it would instead create a ripple-effect within the ocean’s ecosystem.
“They have a right to live on the planet too,” LaBedz said.
DLNR Division of Aquatic Resources Kaua‘i Monk Seal Response Coordinator Mimi Olry agreed.
“The community, on the whole, values at a deep level the wildlife of Hawai‘i … that the natural things are what make Hawai‘i so unique and beautiful,” she wrote in an e-mail Thursday. “It is the place and wild things that are native to Hawai‘i that the culture of Hawaiiana is so intrinsically tied to at a creation level. To lose the creatures of Hawai‘i, that in their creation each ocean and land being is united to the people of Hawai‘i, is to lose what makes Hawai‘i special, not only physically, but also spiritually.”
Olry said her volunteers are “not involved with the reward,” as it is a “response by community members.”
“I have found the people of Kaua‘i are terribly upset that someone would be shooting seals on our beaches, making it unsafe for all of us,” she said of the community’s response to the North Shore seal killing, which included many donations.
For more information on how to make a donation, visit surfriderkauai.ning.com.
• Coco Zickos, business and environmental writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 251) or czickos@kauaipubco.com.
