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Caribbean monk seal is extinct

Posted at 4:26 PM on 06 Jun 2008

The Caribbean monk seal is extinct, U.S. officials declared Friday. The seals, also called West Indian seals, have been on the endangered-species list since 1967; the last confirmed sighting of one was in 1952. The Caribbean monk, native to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, is the only seal that has gone extinct directly because of human causes. "Following European colonization from the 1700s to 1900s, the seals were exploited intensively for their blubber, and to a lesser extent for food, scientific study, and zoological collection," the U.S. Marine Fisheries Service explained in a statement. Those carrying on the monk seal name are also barely hanging on: only 1,200 Hawaiian monk seals and 500 Mediterranean monk seals remain in the wild, and the Hawaiian population is declining at a rate of 4 percent per year.

source: MSNBC

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Comments: (2 comments)

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Maybe, but...

...there have been unconfirmed sightings of Monk Seals on Haiti and Jamaica (though there is some debate if they are Monk Seals or Hooded Seals).

Think of it like Stellar's Sea Cow. It's probably extinct, but there's a very slim chance that it's not.

by Tasermons Partner at 9:45 PM on 06 Jun 2008

none left; affluence

The IUCN was ready to call this poor critter extinct back in 1996; and if the last confirmed sighting was in the mid-1950s, then today's news from the US agency is a few steps beyond where we are with, say, the Yangtze river dolphin or Baiji, which a Swiss worker in China who had been looking for it for some time declared last winter to be extinct.

The Monachus-Guardian page has a picture of a Caribbean monk seal from 1910, lying beside his/her pool in a zoo in New York:

http://www.monachus-guardian.org/factfiles/carib01.htm.

As for the Steller's sea cow, their last known range, along the Pacific shore of Siberia, is indeed very remote. But they were very large animals, and usually human observers did not have a hard time spotting them (unfortunately for the sea cows!). They disappeared in the 18th century; so if one were to be discovered today, that would be an even more amazing reappearance than that of the Ivory-billed woodpecker.

In connexion with the Caribbean monk seal, I was interested to read about their Mediterranean cousin, who appears in ancient Greek art and literature. Cf. the fascinating little story that Menelaus tells to Telemachus, in Odyssey 4, about how he caught Proteus the Old Man of the Sea, when Proteus had come up onto a beach to take a nap among his beloved seals.

In the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, as well as around the Hawaiian Islands, monk seals seem always to have been hunted. But nowadays, presumably it is habitat loss that is the biggest threat to them. And that habitat loss seems driven by ever larger beachfront developments, for the sake of tourism, and preferred residential locations for newly affluent people.

It should not surprise us that many kinds of animals, who used to rely on those beaches, are being severely pressured, such as certain shore birds, and sea turtles.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 5:56 AM on 07 Jun 2008

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