ShareThisBy GABRIEL MARGASAK
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Throngs of visitors at SeaWorld Orlando delighted in the lively bark of a harp seal asking for fish and watching harbor seals swim in a pristine blue aquarium.
But on the inside of the seal pen, the veterinary staff at the famous marine mammal park was saddened by the death of another animal they had tried so desperately to save. Still, researchers hope the animal's death could help solve the mystery of how it ended up on the Treasure Coast -- thousands of miles from its home.
The long journey of a bearded arctic seal ended here Tuesday morning, almost a week after he was spotted off the Treasure Coast. Not even rescue efforts by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution and SeaWorld could help the animal that was likely diseased before it even arrived here.
"I'm hesitant to speculate as to what was really wrong with him ... We're going to perform an exhaustive postmortem examination," said Christopher Dold, a SeaWorld veterinarian.
That could take weeks. But even amid the grim task, there was hope.
"Ironically, there's actually probably more that we can know now that he's expired," Dold said. "So it's a mild silver lining to an otherwise very unfortunate event."
Veterinarians hope tests can show what killed the animal as well as why it ended up on the Treasure Coast as what may be a first for this species of seal.
When a 4-month-old hooded seal named Patches was euthanized last fall, tests found evidence the seal had been searching for food and that might have brought it south from the Arctic. The seal's stomach was filled not with fish but with trash, including a candy-bar wrapper.
"We tried and that's where we're at," said Harbor Branch's Steve McCulloch, manager of the marine-mammal-stranding program. "It's a sad day."
SeaWorld specialists started looking for answers to how the bearded seal swam to the balmy waters of the Treasure Coast from the frigid Arctic icepacks.
Teams from Harbor Branch started tracking the seal after it was spotted Thursday in the Indian River Lagoon and Intracoastal Waterway off Stuart.
The team could only watch because it didn't have the right equipment to attempt a rescue.
Just as wildlife experts predicted, the seal turned up again Friday for a rest on a floating dock at a residential marina at Loblolly Bay in Hobe Sound. A growing contingent of rescuers dumped ice on the dock to try to lure the animal into a kennel. But the seal slipped back into the Intracoastal and disappeared for the weekend.
It emerged again almost 80 miles away in a residential back yard in the Fort Lauderdale area on Monday.
The rescue team snared the seal in a net and jumped on top to wrestle the 6-foot animal weighing about 250 pounds into a truck used to save marine mammals.
Back at SeaWorld, Dold's team tried antibiotics, steroids and rehydrating fluid.
"We're of course saddened by the outcome of this ... we always hold out hope that we're going to be able to save lives and hopefully return every stranded marine mammal that comes to us to their natural environment," Dold said.
(Contact Gabriel Margasak of The Stuart News in Florida ar www.tcpalm.com.)
