Eels In Seals: Nobody ‘Nose’ Why Seals Seem To Be Snorting Eels

This is a fine kettle of fish for the endangered Hawaiian monk seals. For reasons no one can quite explain, eels are ending up in the seals’ snouts, hanging out like something that should have been mopped away with a sturdy hanky. It’s a real phenomenon, according to the scientists at the government’s Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Project.

The problem is for the eels, not the seals. They’ve been found stuck up juvenile seals’ noses on “multiple occasions” over the past four years or so, and they don’t live to be snorted again. Fortunately for the endangered seals, they’ve all been OK after the eels were removed from their snouts and don’t seem to have suffered any side effects from their puzzling predicament.

This eel-in-the-seal’s-snout thing could be an anomaly.

“In the nearly 40 years that we have been working to monitor and protect endangered Hawaiian monk seals, we have only started seeing ‘eels in noses’ in the last few years,” researchers with the project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote. “Yet, our researchers have observed this phenomenon three or four times now. We don't know if this is just some strange statistical anomaly or if we will see more eels in seals in the future.”

It could be that the eels are in the right place at the wrong time and that the young seals are just bad hunters. Hawaiian monk seals don’t have hands, so they hunt with their faces. During foraging, a seal shoves its mouth and nose into the crevasses of coral reefs, under rocks or into the sand to find prey, including eels, octopus and other fish. Or, the researchers suggest in a post on the NOAA Fisheries website, it could be the seal swallowed the eel and regurgitated it — something seals frequently do — “so that the eel came out the wrong way.”

But, they said, “We might never know.”

“You see some very strange things if you watch nature long enough, and this could end up being one of these little oddities and mysteries of our careers that 40 years from now, we’ll be retired and still questioning quite how this happened,” Charles Littnan, the lead scientist at the monk seal program, told The Washington Post.

Littnan got a confusing email about two years ago from field researchers with the subject line, “Eel in nose,” according to The Washington Post.

“It was just like, ‘We found a seal with an eel stuck in its nose. Do we have a protocol?’ ” Littnan told The Post in a phone interview.

There was no protocol, and over several emails and in phone calls, he guided the researchers through grabbing the bit of eel that was showing and pulling it out.

“There was only maybe two inches of the eel actually still sticking out of the nose, so it was very much akin to the magician’s trick when they’re pulling out the handkerchiefs and they keep coming and coming and coming,” he said.

He figures it may just be a phase juvenile seals go through.

Like their human counterparts, teenage monk seals “seem naturally attracted to getting into troublesome situations,” Littnan told The Post. “It almost does feel like one of those teenage trends that happen. One juvenile seal did this very stupid thing and now the others are trying to mimic it.”

All of the cases were reported from remote islands that only scientists frequent, ruling out any human involvement, Littnan said.

The seals’ predicament has prompted some Twitter moments. Here are a few of them that may make you, ahem, snort.