Mankind dropped another ball--June 8, 2008

The Caribbean Monk Seal or West Indian Monk Seal (Monachus tropicalis), is an extinct species of seal. It is the only seal ever known to be native to the Caribbean sea and the Gulf of Mexico. The last recorded sighting occurred in 1952. On June 6, 2008, after five years of futile efforts to find or confirm sightings of any Caribbean monk seals, the U.S. government announced that the species is officially extinct and the only seal to vanish due to human causes.

Captive Caribbean monk seal of unknown sex at the New York Aquarium in ca. 1910. Specimen originally captured from either Arrecife´s Tria´ngulos (Campeche) or Arrecife Alacra´n (Yucatan) in Mexico (Townsend 1909). New York Zoological Society, 1910.

The Caribbean monk seal was the first New World mammal to be discovered by Columbus and his company on the coast of Santo Domingo in 1494. It appears in the account of Columbus' second voyage to America. Columbus promptly ordered his crew to kill eight of the animals, which he called "sea-wolves", for food, paving the way for exploitation of the species by European immigrants who came in his wake. Since then, the once abundant seals have been hunted for their oil and slaughtered by fishermen, who regarded the animals as competitors.

H. Sloan wrote in 1707: "The Bahama Islands are filled with seals; sometimes fishers will catch one hundred in a night". The Caribbean monk seal was documented as being easily approachable and not aggressive. They were easily killed during directed hunts in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is also known that sailors, whalers, and fishers opportunistically killed the seals they encountered. As well, Caribbean monk seals were killed by museum collectors and displayed in zoos. The end of the 19th century witnessed relentless slaughters and the species had already become rare in the 1880's, before it was properly known to science. The Triangle Keys have remained a stronghold of the species until 1915, when about 200 animals were butchered there. (Van den Hoek Ostende, 1999)

The last confirmed sighting in 1952 was of a small colony on Seranilla Bank, a group of tiny coral islands halfway between Jamaica and Honduras (Van den Hoek Ostende, 1999). An aerial survey in 1973, conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, found extensive fishing activity throughout the former range of this seal. A later cruise through the Gulf of Mexico and around the Yucatan Peninsula failed to find any Caribbean monk seals in the area. Surveys have been carried out as late as 1993, all without success. The Caribbean monk seal was formally declared extinct in the 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals.

Based on interviews with 93 fishermen in northern Haiti and Jamaica during 1997 Boyd and Stanfield (1998) made an assessment of the likelihood that monk seals survive in this region of the West Indies. Those fishermen that were able to provide further descriptions gave information about size and colour that was consistent with many of these seals being monk seals. They concluded that it is possible that the Caribbean monk seal is not extinct. (Boyd & Stanfield, 1998)

Local fishermen and divers regularly claim to have seen the seal, making the existence of this animal still a possibility, though some biologists believe that these sightings may surely be of wandering hooded seals, which have been positively been identified in islands such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.