Investigation and description of the foraging behavior of monk seals in the main Hawaiian Islands, including a metric to classify foraging behavior from telemetry instruments.
To assess the efficacy of translocating seals to areas of greater prey availability, 12 weanling monk seals were translocated with pre-release health screening and post-release monitoring.
We individually identified 297 monk seals between 1988 and 2014 and recorded that 83 (28 percent) of these had at least one documented hooking or entanglement.
Visual observations of individually identifiable monk seals associating onshore were used to estimate contact rates, assuming random mixing, and also to investigate contact patterns of different age and sex classes.
The 2015 Hawaiian monk seal population census reveals a "remarkable" increase in survival rates and a new total population estimate for the native seal of Hawaiʻi.
As Hawaiian monk seal population numbers continue to decline, outstanding fine-scale genetic questions require enhanced genotyping capacity of a rich archive of specimens.
