On the coastline around Kaikōura, the rocks seem to be moving. Jutting from the sea, shimmering in the summer heat, their grey planes begin to shift and ripple.
Step closer and you recognise them, first by their sound: a distant honking, barking, yelping. Then, by their smell: thick and potent, a mixture of kelp and excrement. Seals, hundreds of them, possibly thousands, are coming ashore for pupping. They roll in constant, joyful helixes in the rock pools, emerge from the sea to glisten like puddles of oil, or bask unmoving in the sun like comatose adolescents recovering from a hangover.
Once they would have been even thicker on these shorelines. Before humans came to New Zealand, millions of fur seals populated the coasts. They were hunted almost to extinction, but in the century since the sealing industry collapsed, they have become a protected species and started to flourish, recovering to more than 200,000. That comeback has not been without complications. As seal numbers have grown, their colonies increasingly expand into areas of human habitation – bringing them into increasing, troublesome, occasionally violent contact with people.
Victory and new challenges
Fur seals are not to be trifled with. While they look ungainly out of the water, they can move on land at a brisk 20km/h – an alarming speed for up to 180kg of solid muscle and blubber. They can be aggressive and will bite when provoked. When one group of researchers required DNA specimens, for example, they had enormous trouble getting close enough to jab the creatures’ blubber for a sample. The scientists finally landed on a strategy – borrowing riot shields from the local police station. They would take a boat to the rocks, disembark with riot shields up, attempt to keep balance on slick, seaweed-covered rocks and spend as short a time as possible poking increasingly enraged seals as they lunged.
“Those were pretty interesting days for collecting,” Dr Adrian Paterson says. An associate professor at Lincoln University studying New Zealand’s ecological evolution, Paterson and his colleagues used genome sequencing from those samples to reverse-calculate the size of New Zealand’s historic seal populations. They landed on the figure of about 3 million. “One of the things that motivated our research was just saying, ‘Well, how many seals were there in the past? How much bigger could the population get? What can be sustained effectively by the seas around us?’ And basically, what we found was that the population could get huge – hugely larger and much more widespread.”
A huge and growing population of seals would be both an enormous conservation victory and a thorny question for New Zealand’s human populations, who live in sometimes uneasy proximity to them.
“That’s a big question for society for the next couple of decades, because you’ll have your million-dollar property by the sea, and if a smelly fur seal colony turns up that’s not going to be good for your property value,” Paterson says. “As tensions rise in the future with more and more human-seal contact, it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.”
A ‘heartbreaking’ attack
At times those tensions can erupt into shocking violence. Harming a seal is a criminal offence in New Zealand, punishable by up to two years in prison or a fine of up to $250,000 – but the years have been marked by occasional ugly incidents of seals being targeted for sport or in disturbing killing sprees.
Last month Department of Conservation (DoC) rangers found 19 seals dead at this lookout – at least nine of which they determined had recently been shot. In 2010 two men who worked on a salmon farm were charged with clubbing 23 seals to death. The men, who were found guilty, argued the seals were pests that had depleted the fishing stocks. In 2005, former All Black Andrew Hore and two other men returned from a fishing trip and shot and killed at least one seal on the coast.
“It was extremely distressing – actually heartbreaking,” says Dr Jody Weir, of the seals killed last month. A senior marine biodiversity ranger based in Kaikōura, she was one of those who had to deal with the incident, and her voice is emotional as she looks out over the colony. “It’s not the norm, however – 99% of people have a great respect for this ecosystem and the amazing animals that play a part. There are a few people that have misguided ideas.”
There’s a misconception among fishers, Weir and Paterson say, that seals are consuming the fish that people want to catch. In fact most of their diet is lanternfish and octopus. But even their presence – smelly, territorial, unsafe to approach – can raise some people’s hackles. “They are dangerous animals, you don’t want them to bite you,” Paterson says, “You’ve got to be careful around them and that just adds to the tensions.”
The pup count
This month, working along the Kaikōura coastline, Weir is in the middle of a pup count – the first since the 2016 Kaikōura earthquakes radically reshaped the shoreline and displaced some of the fur seal colonies. She walks the shoreline armed with binoculars and a pair of clickers, counting how many new pups are being born in the colony. “You want your movements to be slow, but not sneaky,” she says, edging down a hillside to get a better look at a collection of pups playing in a rock pool.
A specialist in animal behaviour, Weir says conservation involves understanding both wildlife and human activity – “because, of course, we’re animals as well” – and attempting to ease friction between them.
“With the fur seal colony changing and growing … this isn’t something that’s going to go away. Fur seals are here now, thank goodness, they’re part of the system. So how do we learn to grow alongside them to minimise those kinds of conflict?” She points to a new stretch of fencing, installed to stop seals getting stuck on the highway. They were sometimes hit by cars – a disaster for both the seal and any bumper hitting a 300 pound animal at speed. So far the fence seems to have worked: a small step to ease the relationship between the marine mammals and their bipedal neighbours.
Weir says she often thinks about the hundreds of southern right whales that used to have their calves in a bay north of Kaikōura township. “There’s records in the town hall, notes about people complaining that they were too loud, that they were trumpeting, the racket of these whales,” she says. As the whaling industry arrived, they were slaughtered – and even when industry declined and the whales were protected, for decades they never returned to the bay.
“It used to be that they were the pests, that they were the ones that were annoying,” she says. “If we look at that on a bigger scale and think: right now, people are grumbling about fur seals – some people, a small minority of people. But if we pan out and realise the damage that people can do, but also the treasure that is the wildlife that we have here? It helps to turn that around.”
