The Monk Seal Conspiracy

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3. Oracle of a Dying Sea

‘As the seal dies, so does the sea.’ I was to hear this sagacious proverb from the wizened lips of an old fisherman in the Sporades islands, years later. The saying, although deceptively simple, holds a profound truth in that the monk seal is not merely a poetic symbol of an ailing Mediterranean, but also an ecological microcosm of every human threat and injury that the sea has to bear. Both sea and seal are dying for the same reasons, the spreading cancer of an urban landscape, a civilization which gorges itself to excess and fouls its own nest with toxic waste, humanity’s insatiable greed in overfishing the sea, the floating factories which scrape away the womb of the seabed, throwing back lifeless literally hundreds of thousands of tons of fish unknown to the fastidious tastes of the marketplace. Then there is that other form of pollution, the industry of mass tourism which, like a plague of locusts, brings 110 million visitors to the Mediterranean every year. Resorts sprout like little concrete cities, like ugly tumours in the middle of traditional fishing villages, and all in the hallowed name of development and progress, consuming the coastal wetlands where fish breed, overtaking the beaches where seals used to nurse their pups, forever creeping further and further until concrete meets concrete.

Both human and seal reside at the very summit of the Mediterranean’s food chain, and it is here that pollutants begin to accumulate as one species preys upon another. Will both species then ultimately share the same fate? Perhaps, although the only thing that can be said with certainty is that the monk seal’s decline is a daunting indication of the Mediterranean’s illness, a warning that the sea’s ecosystem is losing its equilibrium and that pollution is reaching dangerous levels. Because of oil contamination, seals often suffer serious skin inflammations and, ultimately, death by poisoning as the animal frantically tries to clean its coat. At the same time, mercury and pesticides are causing abortions, premature births and genetic defects.

The Mediterranean comprises merely 1 per cent of the world’s ocean, but contains 50 per cent of floating oil and tar. It is a sea which Jacques Cousteau has called ‘mortally ill’, and yet pollution levels have become so politically and economically sensitive that sometimes they have even been classified as secret.

In Italy several years ago, permissible pollution levels were expediently revised so that some of the most lucrative resorts and beaches would not have to be condemned as insanitary.

As a virtually enclosed sea, it takes between 80 and 100 years for the Mediterranean to renew its waters. This natural cleansing cannot cope with the staggering levels of pollution which the sea is now being subjected to. Once again, the schizophrenia of the human race is all too evident. The shores of the Mediterranean cater for 35 per cent of the world’s tourist trade and the sea is a source of food for many of the 100 million people who live in the Mediterranean basin, a population expected to double by the first decade of the 21^st century. At the same time, the sea is used as a convenient dumping ground for sewage and industrial chemicals, and serves as a major waterway for oil tankers and freighters.

The livelihoods of at least 40 million people are entirely dependent upon the health of the Mediterranean. But if the sea dies, what then? Perhaps we shall resurrect the visionary dreams of the early 19th century, of closing the Straits of Gibraltar and gradually draining the sea. It may well be the only way of ridding humanity of what is inexorably becoming a giant cesspool.

Ninety per cent of the sewage from 120 coastal cities is still being pumped into the sea, and rivers, some little more than open sewers, are used as drains for thousands of tons of chemical pollutants, including detergents, pesticides and fertilizers, petroleum products and heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium. Mediterranean fish are now tainted with carcinogenic oil compounds. At least 115,000 tons of oil is dumped into the sea every year by coastal factories, and another 320,000 tons by oil tankers washing out their tanks and bilges, often illegally. Radioactivity levels remain relatively low, and yet there is growing concern about the presence of plutonium originating from nuclear weapons tests over the last quarter century. Artificial fertilizers have caused an alarming increase in plankton blooms, covering bathers in skin-irritating slime and causing the death of thousands of fish and seabirds.

The economies of some Mediterranean resorts are plunging because tourists have been driven away by fears over microbial epidemics, infestations of jellyfish, trash and tarballs piling up on beaches and floating offshore. According to the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Health Organization, 20 to 25 per cent of the Mediterranean’s bathing beaches have been judged unsatisfactory for swimming, only 3 or 4 per cent of the sea’s shellfish-growing areas are now considered safe for breeding shellfish for direct human consumption, and eating Mediterranean tuna and swordfish has been declared unsafe for pregnant women because of high levels of mercury. In 1975, fishermen in France were warned that if they consumed more than two kilos of fish a week, they would be chronically ill within seven years and dead within twenty years. But by 1981, the scientists, under pressure from commercial interests, were advising governments to scrap regulations governing the level of mercury in fish. They reasoned that only 100 tons of the toxic metal was entering the sea every year as a human pollutant, while over 500 tons was originating from natural sources, such as underwater volcanoes. Expediently, they gave scant credence to the inconvenient fact that the Mediterranean basin has the largest mercury mines in the world, adding to the ‘natural’ leaching of the metal into the sea.

A bather in the Mediterranean now has a one in seven chance of catching a disease, including a variety of allergies, viral hepatitis, dysentery, typhoid and even cholera.

The Mediterranean, surrounded by Europe, Asia and Africa, is also a microcosm of global ecological destruction. While the rich northern states are responsible for 80 per cent of the sea’s pollution, the poor Third World countries of the south, such as Morocco and Algeria, are unwilling to agree on international pollution controls at the expense of their own development. This economic free-for-all is just as evident among European states. Industrial development along the Mediterranean’s coasts rages unabated, with thousands of new factories being built without adequate pollution controls. In the desperate quest for quick profits, tourism too is growing by leaps and bounds, with some coastal populations reaching ten times normal levels during the summer months.

As usual, the greatest scourge of all is bureaucracy, since any chemical or pollutant is innocent until proven guilty. Commercial competition, more like an economic war zone, eclipses almost every other concern, even the suicidal ruin of the sea. To placate criticism and to delay the day of reckoning for as long as possible, governments grudgingly provide their most conservative scientists with millions of dollars to produce decades of esoteric research and forests of paperwork, most of which is never even read, let alone acted upon. Undaunted, the scientists have at least bequeathed their vital statistics to posterity, such as the 5.04 tourists who will fit on each linear metre of coastline by 1990. And then, with great fanfare, come the glittering conferences, the international treaties, the watered-down laws, and the sea continues to die.

In ancient Greece, on the other hand, Nature was safeguarded by deep religious faith, not legislation. Earth was venerated as the ‘oldest of the gods’, Gaia, the mother of all. Monk seals were placed under the protection of Poseidon and Apollo because they showed a great love for sea and sun, and the killing of a seal or dolphin was often regarded as a sacrilege. One of the first coins, minted around 500 BC, depicted the head of a monk seal, and the creatures were immortalized in the writings of Homer, Plutarch and Aristotle. To fishermen and seafarers, catching sight of the animals frolicking in the waves or loafing on the beaches was considered to be an omen of good fortune.

For the following two thousand years the monk seal had the protection of no god or human law. The seals lived in large herds, throughout the Mediterranean, the Marmara and Black seas, as well as the north-west Atlantic coast of Africa. From prehistoric times until the early 19th century, humans hunted seals for the basic necessities of their own survival – fur, oil and meat – but did not kill them in large enough numbers to endanger their existence as a species. The pelts were used to make boats and tents and were said to give protection against Nature’s more hostile elements, especially lightning. The skins were also made into shoes and clothing, and the fat used for oil lamps and tallow candles. Because the animal was known to sleep so soundly, the right flipper of a seal, placed under the pillow, was thought to cure insomnia.

By the 19th century, however, the seal slaughter had become a commercial enterprise verging on genocide, and numerous colonies were becoming extinct. Because of their trusting nature they were easy prey. Tens of thousands were bludgeoned to death, their skins put on sale in the fashionable capitals of Europe. Although hunting of the creatures on this scale rapidly became unfeasible, they never recovered. The massive disruption of two world wars, the industrial revolution, a boom in tourism and the onset of factory fishing all contributed to the monk seal’s decline. Their numbers may have been reduced by go per cent in the last fifty years and the species will be virtually extinct by 1995 if nothing is done to save them.

As the fishing grounds begin to collapse under fierce commercial competition, the seals are faced with a scarcity of food. The hungry animals then tear their way into fishing nets to obtain their meal. In this vicious circle, fishermen have come to regard the seal as an enemy which destroys their nets and steals their fish. Although the seals often get trapped in the nets and drown, the fishermen usually don’t hesitate to kill the creature when the opportunity presents itself. Depressingly frequent reports have revealed that the seals are often the victims of deliberate cruelty, unjustly held responsible for a sea which is rapidly becoming exhausted by human greed. Kicked, stoned, shot and dynamited, this is the price that the monk seal has to pay for our own ecological ignorance.

Fisherman mending his seal-damaged nets on Leros.

The centuries of persecution have also had a profound psychological effect upon the seals, and they are now literally terrified of human disturbance. Only in Mauritania have the seals managed to retain their frolicsome nature and their innocent curiosity towards the few human beings who venture into their peaceful refuge of sandy beaches and arching caves. Here, undisturbed, the seals have formed their largest colonies, numbering up to sixty individuals.

Mauritania may represent one of the last truly natural habitats of the monk seal, where the animals can still be seen basking in the sun or playing with their pups in the gentle surf. But in the Mediterranean, mass tourism and urbanization have driven the seals away from the beaches to inhabit rocky and desolate coastlines. With a boom in pleasure-boating, even these areas are now coming under threat, particularly as the seals give birth between May and November, during the height of the tourist season. The killing of a monk seal may be illegal on paper, but the animals are still the target of sports hunters and even tourists with spear-guns. The last seals of Tunisia, in the Galite archipelago, disappeared in 1985. Two were reportedly captured for an Italian travelling circus, and another speared by a snorkelling Italian tourist.

Once renowned for their friendly and confiding nature, the seals have now been forced to hide and give birth in dismal caves as a last refuge for their lives. It is doubtful that this will help them survive. Autumn and winter storms often cause breakers to surge into the caves, washing the weaning pups out into the sea where they drown. Human disturbance can also break the fragile mother-pup bond during the 16-week weaning period, leaving the infant seal to perish, unable to fend for itself. There has even been evidence of mothers aborting their young, apparently because of the fright and panic inspired by their only predator, homo sapiens.

Today, no more than 350 seals have managed to survive this relentless persecution, and the species has disappeared from most of its former range. Scattered colonies, often numbering no more than two or three individuals, are now found along the coasts of Madeira, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Sardinia and Yugoslavia. But almost three-quarters of the entire remaining monk seal population has found its last refuge in the Aegean, especially on the Greek and Turkish borders, a tense military zone.

As we made our way back to Greece on that December night of 1979, little did I realize that the monk seal would come to typify the reluctance of the conservation movement to tackle military issues, even when they have a direct bearing on the survival of an endangered species. Military exercises with warships, fighter planes, tanks and artillery, the sowing of minefields along beaches, the relentless growth of habitat-devouring military installations – all of these have a silent but insidious bearing on Mediterranean wildlife. And the military threat to the seals is not only apparent in the eastern Aegean, but also in Spain and Mauritania. Each summer, 1,500 Spanish soldiers invade the tiny island of Cabrera, just off the coast of Majorca, to practise artillery and small arms fire. By the early 1960s, the last two monk seals of the island had disappeared; the manoeuvres had either driven them away or they had perished during target practice. On the coast, entire caves had been sunk and demolished with artillery shells. Other endangered species had also been killed under the direct impact of cannonfire. The osprey, Eleonora’s falcon and Audouin’s gull, the rarest seagull in the world – their bodies littered the island.

A monk seal colony north of Mauritania’s border with the Sahara has also suffered the casualties of war. The territory has been proclaimed as the Democratic Republic of the Sahara by Polisario guerrillas who are waging a bitter war against Morocco. Although Mauritania reached an accord with the Polisario in 1980, travel north of the border is still considered dangerous, due in part to the guerrillas’ own trigger-happiness. Bored soldiers on both sides of the border have been taking pot shots at the seals and, despite the area’s remoteness, several seal deaths have been recorded.

The precise origins of the monk seal’s name have long been lost to obscurity and the flow of time. In Greek mythology the seal was represented as the god Phokos, son of Poseidon. Several towns and villages were named after the seal god, and even today the Greek word for seal continues to be phokia. Pliny the elder, ancient Rome’s renowned scholar of natural history, knew the animals as sea-calves and remarked that they ‘could be taught to salute the public with their voice, and when called by name to reply with a harsh roar.’ Rather more mystically, he added that at night ‘their eyes change frequently into a thousand colours.’ But it was not until 1779 that the German naturalist Johann Hermann officially christened the species Monachus. The choice may have been inspired by Hermann’s belief in the animal’s innate reclusiveness following his discovery of a lone seal on the Dalmatian coast. On the other hand, some naturalists believe that Hermann merely adopted a traditional name for the seal from certain local fishing communities on the shores of the Mediterranean which knew the creature as ‘monk’ because of the colour of its fur. Indeed, many centuries earlier, Pliny too thought that the rows of seals he observed stretched out on the sands bore a striking resemblance to a congregation of hooded humans. Sometimes, the darker fur around the head of the seal lends weight to this impression.

In Italy, monk seals were once numerous along the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia Tuscany and the Adriatic. The Roman emperor Octavius Augustus kept seals as exotic pets in 29 BC, just as the empire was razing forests for its fleets of warships and devastating almost every wild species it came across. Two thousand years later, in 1951, the London Times reported that passers-by were astonished to see a seal swimming in Rome’s Piazza da Trevi fountain. ‘The animal was the property of two Roman journalists,’ the Times reported, ‘who had brought it back from Sardinia and who apparently thought it suitable that the seal should have a swim in such famous surroundings. A literal-minded policeman fined them for contravening a by-law which prohibits the throwing of anything but money in the fountain, and they and the seal then departed in a motor-car.’

Today it is estimated that only two seals live around the shores of Sardinia, in the east coast’s Golfo d’Oresei. They may share the tragedy of being the only surviving members of their species in the whole of Italy. With tens of thousands of holiday-makers visiting the island every summer and a boom in pleasure-boating and spear-fishing, the last seals of Italy could literally become extinct at any moment. The coasts of Sicily and Tuscany probably lost their last seals more than ten years ago. In 1978, another pair of seals were regularly observed around the island of Montecristo, but once again, government protection, in the form of a marine sanctuary, came too late to save them. The tragedy illustrates the archetypal reaction of bureaucracies to the plight of the monk seal, that of reluctantly taking measures which are habitually too little, too late.

A neonate monk seal pup photographed in a cave in the Golfo d’Orosei in Sardinia in 1971.

In a similar bureaucratic blunder, Corsica’s last pair of seals were killed by fishermen in 1976, just eight weeks before the I inaugural ceremonies of a marine sanctuary designed to protect the animals. The last seals of greater France died on the Isles d’Hyeres in 1935, and today the only trace of the monk seal is its depiction in the prehistoric cave paintings found in the Pyrenees. The seal became extinct in Israel, Libya, Syria and Lebanon in the 1950s, helped on its way by war. Up to fifty seals may survive along the coasts of Algeria, in part because Moslem fishermen still believe the killing of the animals to be a sin. Further west, small groups of seals are still found along the shores of Morocco and the nearby Chafarinas islands which belong to Spain. Of the Atlantic monk seals, which may differ genetically from their Mediterranean cousins, the wounded seal that was captured on one of the Lanzarote islands in 1983 probably spelled the extinction of the species in the Canary islands.

Monk seals were abundant around the precipitous and volcanic coastlines of Madeira during the last centuries, but human pressure has driven them away to the desolate and uninhabited Desertas islands lying off the southern tip of Madeira. Here, no more than six individuals have managed to retain a precarious hold on life. The Desertas also lie in traditional fishing grounds where fishermen often lose their nets to the rocky seabed. Because these are now made of synthetic materials, they then become what are known as ‘ghost nets’, trapping and killing marine wildlife almost forever. As young seals play with the debris, the net fragments can become entwined about their throats and gradually, over many months as the seal grows, the animal is choked to death in agony.

On the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia and its scattering of offshore islands, no more than twenty seals have managed to survive the onslaughts of mass tourism. Little is known of the Russian seals, inhabiting the waters of the Crimea, but they are reliably believed to be extinct. Further west, however, some individuals may still survive in the Soviet waters of the Black sea, if only because on the Turkish side, up to thirty animals are thought to be still alive.

Since the monk seal has become so shy and retiring, only one thing can be said with certainty, and that is that the war against the species and its habitat rages unabated, and all in the name of progress. As for the sanctuaries that a benevolent humankind is willing to provide for the creature, they are few and far between. Ironically, it was one of the poorest Third World countries, Mauritania, which first opened a refuge for the seals. There are two more in Turkey and one perennially due to open in the northern Sporades islands of Greece, far away from the eastern Aegean but an important colony, perhaps holding up to thirty individuals. Other parks are planned for Madeira’s Desertas islands, for the Chafarinas of Spain and the Golfo d’Oresei in Sardinia. But bureaucracy being what it is, some of these may well open to protect no more than a desolate memory, their last seals killed before the departments and committees and conferences have written and sifted through their mountains of paperwork.

As I read through similarly daunting reports on that December night, it became obvious to me that saving the monk seal would be one of the most formidable tasks ever undertaken by the conservation movement. So numerous, so diverse and so critical were the problems facing this persecuted animal that only a holistic campaign would have any chance of success. And it would be a fight against time. For decades, its plight had aroused little more than reluctant platitudes of concern. The monk seal was perhaps one of the most forgotten endangered species in the entire world. While Europeans were waging a bitter struggle against the slaughter of harp seal pups on Canada’s distant, blood-stained ice-floes, their own monk seals were being allowed to perish in total obscurity. There was no public outcry, no great media extravaganza, no one willing to risk their reputation let alone their life for the species.

What then is the cause of this neglect? One reason is the virtually secret triage strategy which has been adopted by the world’s most influential conservationists. Swamped by a seemingly endless series of ecological catastrophes, and facing the extinction of up to a million animal and plant species by the year 2010, the movement, rather than reform itself, is now faced with the hideous dilemma of salvaging whatever life it can from the holocaust and leaving the rest to perish. It borrowed the triage strategy from the Allied commanders of the First World War who, during the hellish nightmares of trench warfare, were forced to divide the wounded into three separate groups; those that would be left to die since they were not worth squandering precious medicines upon, those that would hopefully survive without any medical attention at all, and finally, those that were deemed worthy of help. The decisions were pitiless, devoid of sentiment or favouritism. Even the best of friends could be left to die in slow agony. But in today’s triage, it is often the demigods in the hierarchies of the world’s conservation organizations, in their plush offices, Hiltons and conference rooms, who are deciding which species to rescue and which will be left to die. More often than not, the decision is entirely subjective and may be based on no more than pettiness and personal prejudice. Each conservationist may have their own favourite and so a species may also be sacrificed by whoever happens to be gaining the upper hand in a particular internal feud. This is how homo sapiens plays god in the 20th century.

The harp seal slaughter had all the ingredients of media sensation: the evil hunters, the fluffy white pups, innocent and vulnerable, the crusaders who put their own bodies between seal and club. No issue could be more clear-cut, and so the triage made another of its expedient decisions. It didn’t matter that there were literally hundreds of thousands of seals on the ice, nor that they are not strictly considered to be an endangered species.

But the very foundations of triage are rooted in division, something that the conservation movement is no stranger to. It was not until years later that I realized why triage had sacrificed the monk seal. The answer lay in the complex and interrelated factors which were killing off the species. For the realists who control most of the world’s conservation organizations, the monk seal presented no easy and media-communicable solutions.

Many of those attending the Rhodes monk seal conference had been scientists whose professional interests lay primarily in research, not conservation. This was a distinction not altogether clear to me at first, since almost every working paper that I read concluded with a list of desirable protective measures. But who was to implement those measures? The gulf between ecology in theory and conservation in practice, like so many others in our fragmented society, is a limbo of confusion. Furthermore, it is the research, the conferences, the paper mountains of ecological bureaucracy which bleed and starve meaningful conservation of its resources, talent and ingenuity.

The following morning, bleary-eyed, I went up on deck, hoping that the buffeting wind would clear the cobwebs from my mind. Both the sea and sky were the same profound shade of blue and there, in the distance, the snowy peaks of the Parnassos mountains seemed to hang suspended over the skyline, as if by some miracle of levitation.

The next few weeks we spent on Samos, writing up a detailed and ambitious project plan. I was not interested in superficial ecology. I was convinced that a holistic project was needed, not only to assure the survival of the monk seal, but also to carve out viable alternatives for the islands, suffering the same onslaughts of mass tourism, urbanization and pollution.

The first priority would be the creation of a network of twenty or more biogenetic reserves in the eastern Aegean. Since the seal colonies were so small and scattered, the ‘one reserve at a time’ mentality, often taking up to a decade to accomplish, would have to be replaced with a decisive policy of isolating all the most important whelping sites from human disturbance. As a temporary measure, we suggested that this could be achieved by semi-unilateral action, though with the support of the government. We would pay fishermen to stay out of the most critical areas and appoint Greek observers to monitor the whelping sites. At the same time, pressure would be brought to bear on the government to have the areas declared strictly protected by law.

The biogenetic reserves, being in remote areas, would also protect other endangered species and could also incorporate reforestation programmes, helping to sustain the ecological equilibrium of the entire island. In the buffer zones to the reserves, we proposed that pesticide use should be banned and that a sub-project on biodynamic farming be established. Tackling the overfishing crisis of the islands, we hoped that the undisturbed reserves would also act as fish breeding grounds, but we also advocated a pilot project in small-scale aquaculture, in which a family or group of families could raise fish for their own consumption or for the marketplace. This might allow other important fishing grounds around the islands to recover.

We hoped that alternative energy sources might also be utilized in these sub-projects and perhaps even in the exhibition centres which we envisaged would be built in the buffer zones to the reserves. The use of sun, wind and water energy might show how individual families could lessen their dependence on the polluting and oil-burning generators of the islands.

We would get our message across to the local population with educational programmes in schools, with concerts and exhibitions. We would thus try to point out the links between the cultural decline of the islands, the dying villages and crafts, and the dying forests, sea and seals. Only when these links could be clearly perceived would alternatives be embraced voluntarily by the people. By restoring traditions and local crafts, for instance, and by portraying their island as a friend of Nature, an alternative and dignified kind of tourism might develop in harmony with a fragile culture and environment.

We would also need to establish a bond of trust with the traditional subsistence fishermen of the islands who feel most threatened by the monk seal. We would have to convince them that the seal has become little more than a convenient scapegoat, eclipsing the culpability of the commercial fisheries which are poaching and exhausting their fishing grounds. Although the larger open-sea trawlers are not permitted to lower their nets within 3 kilometres of the coast, they regularly flout the law, taking advantage of the fishery authority’s lack of staff end patrol boats. The end result is that the traditional fishermen are left with dwindling catches, and prompted by hunger, the seals then attack their nets to obtain the food that they and their pups need to survive. It is a vicious circle, and one largely ignored by the government because only the commercial fisheries have lobbying power in the city.

By siding with the local fishermen, we hoped that a reciprocal loyalty and friendship would also buy time for the seals. We did not realize of course how monstrously difficult it would be to squeeze even a token amount of money out of the conservation movement to help the fishermen. After all, wasn’t it the seal we were trying to save, not fishermen? How could we convince our own masters, who were perpetually flustered by their own deadlines, always too busy to listen, too busy to read reports, but always conceited enough to cast off some trite opinion or bigoted cliché? How could we convince them that the fate of both were intertwined, that the lives of both were endangered? No, conferences, banquets, aerial surveys by plane or helicopter – all of these could be funded, but not something that would actually save the life of a seal.

A few weeks later we sailed off to Athens to drum up support for the project within the government, Athens University, and the country’s few and regrettably weak conservation groups. Looking back on it now, it was perhaps rather a cryptic and intriguing advertisement which we placed in the Athens News, calling for volunteers to work on a conservation project in the eastern Aegean – cryptic enough for more than one intelligence agent to apply for a job. We held the interviews in a seedy and dilapidated pension in the Plaka area, which can hardly have conveyed a promising impression, but it was all that we could afford at the time.

A few days later we took the steamer bound for Rhodes to visit the government-run Hydrobiological Station whose aquarium, had, over the years, tried to rear a number of monk seals in captivity. The aquarium turned out to be as dismal and dilapidated as our pension in Athens, its facilities shabby and primitive. I wondered how on earth any scientist worthy of the name could expect a monk seal to thrive under such deplorable conditions, the filthy concrete pools, the squalid hutches meant to simulate the protection of their caves, the rusty railings behind which goggling visitors could observe the most endangered seal species in the world. And indeed every seal that had been brought into captivity here had perished, a total of eight individuals between 1960 and 1980. On one occasion, apparently desperate for seals, fishermen had been asked to bring to the aquarium any that they happened to find wounded, orphaned or abandoned. Not surprisingly, some fishermen promptly wounded a number of seals and dutifully brought them to the aquarium. But still this did not quench the vain curiosities of Science, all cloaked in the glowing altruism of conservation. One over-zealous employee of the aquarium had even barged into the nearest seal cave and virtually snatched a pup from its mother. Bringing it back to these concrete pools, the creature perished after only 40 days, and perhaps predictably, Science was unable to determine the cause of death, since to its clinical mind the pup could not possibly have succumbed to something as simple as loneliness and a broken heart.

Another seal, an adult, had been brought to the aquarium by a fisherman who had captured it by clubbing it over the head with a piece of wood. Although it survived for a remarkable ten years after this event, the seal remained antagonistic to humans until its last breath, bitterly resenting its captivity.

Snatched from the wild, most monk seals promptly begin to starve themselves – often to death. The pups that were brought to the Rhodes aquarium were therefore force-fed with a pair of wooden pincers, or sometimes through a syringe delivering a bizarre mixture of Ovaltine and sugar. None of the seals ever accepted their captivity and all but one died within a few weeks. They would tremble violently in their concrete habitat and were often heard to cry out in anguish.

As we turned our backs on these squalid and empty pools, we of course had no idea that they would ultimately play an ominous and instrumental role in the Monk Seal Conspiracy.

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