The Strange—but Necessary—Task of Vaccinating Wild Seals | National Geographic

You're walking around with a sharp needle on the end of a stick, and you're walking around rocks and tide pools and some terrain that could be tricky. Then, you're approaching a 400-plus-pound animal, an endangered species, and you're going to try to, you know, jab it with a syringe.

The NOAA Hawaiian monk seal research program is the only group that is proactively going out and vaccinating a large subspecies of a marine mammal population anywhere in the world right now. So, it really is a very unique program that we're excited to be starting out one step at a time.

There are between 1,200 and 1,300 Hawaiian monk seals left. They live exclusively in Hawaiian waters, and so they range from the Big Island at the southernmost end of the archipelago all the way out to Kure Atoll at the end of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Tracy and I discovered that having a hand signal like this demonstrates that the safety is off. It's a good reminder.

Morbillivirus is what we're hoping to protect these seals against, and people may be more familiar with a few specific morbilliviruses, such as canine distemper. So, that is something that dogs are vaccinated against routinely. Measles is another type of morbillivirus, and that's the morbillivirus that affects humans.

So, if you know much about measles, you know that once it starts to spread, it spreads really quickly. This virus has killed seals in other parts of the world on the order of tens of thousands of animals. If you think about that relative to the number of monk seals that are in existence, we really don't think that the population could sustain an outbreak of a morbillivirus.

When we're working with seals, we're trying not to disturb them unless it is for a specific purpose. That's one of the reasons that, for the vaccination project, we're really happy that we've been able to incorporate using this tool. It's essentially a spring-loaded syringe on a pole, which gives people a safe distance away from the seal in case the seal does rear back and respond.

A lot of the seals so far haven't responded very dramatically. They may lift their head, turn their upper body, vocalize, and then lay back down. Now they sleep. Let's go regroup, and I can't believe how totally unimpressed they are with our needles. They generally just go right back to sleep and back to the business as usual.

For so long with the Hawaiian monk seal, we've been spending so much trying to fix the things that are going wrong, and we need to get ahead of this to try to do something preventative instead of just following behind. Pup seals are tiny, but they are ferocious in their own right.