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CARIBBEAN MONK SEALS: LOST SEALS OF THE GULF OF MEXICO AND CARIBBEAN SEA. John Hairr. Coachwhip Publications, Landisville, Pennsylvania, USA, 2011. ISBN 978-1616460631, 190 pp.
It was 1992 and I was speaking with Dave Lavigne about monk seals in the context of preparing an action plan on pinnipeds for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In response to the paper by Burney Le Boeuf and colleagues, "The Caribbean Monk Seal Is Extinct" (Le Boeuf et al., 1986), Dave remarked that he thought it would be wonderful to someday be able to pub-lish a paper simply titled "No It's Not." As it turns out, in 1994, the IUCN concluded that the spe-cies should be considered extinct and listed it as such (Kovacs, 2008). Some years later, U.S. sci-entists and bureaucrats concurred, and Monachus tropicalis was removed from the list of species covered by the Endangered Species Act "due to the extinction of the species" (National Marine Fisheries Service [NMFS], 2008).
John Hairr has just published a book that sum-marizes much of the story about monk seals in the Caribbean, and it unfortunately does nothing to change the conclusion that they are in fact "lost." It has been 60 years since these seals have been reported by a reliable source in spite of a number of substantive efforts to locate survivors. While it isn't possible to prove a negative, the chance that there is a Caribbean monk seal left alive is vanishingly small.
If, like me, you aren't conversant in the details about this sad situation, you will learn a lot from reading Hairr's book. Here's the story in short form. Prior to European discovery, monk seals were widely distributed and common in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea where they flourished in pristine coral reef environments. Christopher Columbus found them in 1494, and his men promptly killed some for food. That's how you fed the crew of a sailing vessel in those days. Over the next four centuries, people killed Caribbean seals by the thousands, for food, for oil, for science, and for no good reason at all. By the early 1900s, their range had contracted, and they were...