The last time the trend improved was in the late 1990s, when the population leveled off for a few years.
BY AUDREY MCAVOY | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HONOLULU — Federal data show cutting Hawaiian monk seals free from fishing nets, moving vulnerable pups away from preying sharks and other efforts to rescue the animals are significantly helping the endangered species.
One-fifth of the roughly 1,100 Hawaiian monk seals in the world are alive today because of interventions to save them, their mother or their grandmother between 1994 and 2009, figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show.
The seal population is also about 30 percent larger today than it would have been if authorities didn’t act.
Charles Littnan, the lead scientist for NOAA’s Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, said this is the first time the agency has studied how interventions to save the lives of individual seals are affecting the overall population. He said the results were about twice as strong as he had hoped or imagined.
“We wish we had done it earlier because it was incredibly inspiring and fulfilling to be able to see that we have made, and all of our partners have made, a dramatic impact,” Littnan said an interview Tuesday.
The survey offered a bit of good news in what has otherwise been a grim few months for the species.
Since mid-November, three monk seals — and possibly four — have been killed by humans on Molokai and Kauai. It is a state and federal crime to harm monk seals, and NOAA and state officials are investigating the deaths.
The monk seal recovery program disentangles monk seals from nets, fishing lines and other debris floating in the ocean. Workers also remove fishing hooks from seal mouths and reunite nursing pups with their mothers if they get separated.
At French Frigate Shoals, an atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, biologists actively move pups from one small island to another to keep them away from sharks that like to take bites out of young seals.
Littnan said the program studied the effects of interventions for the 15 year period because reports from before 1994 were handwritten and would be time consuming to analyze. The survey stops at 2009 because the researchers count a seal as dead only if he or she hasn’t been spotted for at least two years.
NOAA did the study in part to justify its use of taxpayer dollars to help seals.
But officials also would be happy if the report builds support for their efforts to prevent the seals from becoming extinct. Littnan noted NOAA has puts forward some “fairly dramatic proposals” to help the animals.
One idea to temporarily bring weaned pups from the Northwestern Hawaiian to the main Hawaiian Islands for a few years to boost the animal’s chances of survival has encountered opposition from fishermen worried the seals will get caught on their lines and otherwise interfere with their fishing.
“We’re asking people to believe in the program and support the program — whether it is our agency or the public or whomever,” Littnan said.
The monk seal population, which has been declining about 4 percent per year, is still shrinking. But Littnan said the rate slowed slightly to 3.4 percent in the past three years.
It’s being helped by modest improvements among monk seals at Laysan island, Pearl and Hermes reef, and Kure Atoll — all places in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The last time the trend improved was in the late 1990s, when the population leveled off for a few years.