The email below was forwarded to me by Mike Gordon of the Honolulu Advertiser.
Thank you Charles, this is really amazing information.
I enjoyed your article on this lady and admire her stamina and ability. I
thought she might find the recent tracking of a Hawaiian Monk Seal’s swim from
Kaena Point to
Kauai interesting. Maybe you could pass this along to her – after she recovers.
The seal made the swim in 21 hours and from the recorded dives apparently ate
along the way.
“Charles” is Dr. doing research on the monk seals and has “installed” tracking
transmitters on some of the seals. These pictures are from the transmitter on a
seal called Kermit, presently renamed iKermit. The following appeared on the
MonkSealMania.blogspot.com <http://MonkSealMania.blogspot.com><http://MonkSealMania.blogspot.com>
on the daily post of 4/14/10. (you would have to scroll down to older posts)
“Aloha All-
If you are looking for Kermit at Kaena, White Plains, Nanakuli, or anywhere else
on Oahu, you aren’t going to find him. Was so stoked to check the tag this
morning and see he had gone walkabout. At about 10 am on April 12 Kermit
launched from Kaena and headed straight…and I mean STRAIGHT…to Kauai. The
coolest things about this is 1) the track is so so straight (we have good
locations all along the track so we know he was really traveling in a line) and
2) you see examples of two dive types. At the beginning of his journey he is
still moving along the bottom feeding and getting ready to cross, then once he
starts moving you see what are called traveling dives. They are a little more
rounded and much shallower. The last image shows him traveling over the abyssal
depths of the channel…must be lonely out there in the big blue ocean. The trip
took about 21 hrs. I love these tags and Google Earth. They reveal so much about
these impressive seals.
Cheers,
Charles”
[singlepic id=693 w=320 h=240 float=]
