Seal has another pup at Po'ipu
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
PO'IPU, Kaua'i — A seal mom returned to Po'ipu Beach Park for the second consecutive year to give birth yesterday morning, presenting dawn beachgoers with a view of an apparently healthy, jet-black pup.
"She's an experienced mother, so we hope it will go well," said Margaret Akamine Dupree, protected species coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The biggest fear is attacks by loose dogs. Volunteers have erected a fence to keep people and animals away from the seal, and will staff the perimeter day and night.
Monk seal volunteer coordinator Barbara Frazier said she had been told by biologists that the seal might return to the same beach at which it gave birth last year.
"We hoped it wouldn't," she said, because of the number of beachgoers at the park, the most popular on the island. Seals are very sensitive to disturbance, and mothers can abandon pups because of it.
The birth highlights an upsurge in the reproduction of the endangered Hawaiian monk seals in the main Hawaiian islands. The Po'ipu pup is the fifth confirmed this year — there was one other on North Kaua'i, and one each on Moloka'i, Kaho'olawe and at Ka'u on the Big Island.
The untagged female arrived at the beach last year, and gave birth just before dawn July 6. This year it was the same female and the same crowded beach park.
Dupree said the animals normally select isolated beaches where human interference is less of a problem. The beach park is not quiet, but it has a protected white sand beach and nearby shallow reefs where the pup can learn to feed.
Most seal pups are born from February to July, and weigh between 24 and 33 pounds at birth. The adults can weigh 500 to 600 pounds. Mothers do not feed during nursing and will lose as much as 200 pounds.
The Po'ipu mother seal's pup of last year is doing well, Dupree said. It was spotted last year spending time with a pup born a few weeks later at Maha'ulepu, which is four miles east of Po'ipu Beach.
