Hawaii's Crazy War Over Zombie Cats
One Sunday afternoon last November, Michelle Barbieri, a wildlife veterinarian with the national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, received word of a Hawaiian monk seal in distress in a harbor near Oahu's Waikiki Beach. The animal was “logging,” or drifting aimlessly, rather than chasing fish, flopping around on the beach, or doing any of the happy-go-lucky things associated with a nearly two-year-old monk seal. Such reports were not unusual for Barbieri. As the chief medical staffer with NOAA’s Pearl Harbor–based Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, she monitors the health of the species’s 1,300 individuals, the most critically endangered marine mammals in the United States, all of them found in the waters around Hawaii. She receives updates from dozens of beach-roaming volunteers who serve as her eyes and ears across the islands.
Barbieri recognized the juvenile female logging in Ala Wai Harbor as RN36, the identifier on the tag attached to her tail flipper. But the volunteers called her Uilani, “Heavenly Beauty,” and she was something of a celebrity. The New Hope Canoe Club had adopted her as its unofficial mascot, both for her goofy antics and for her possible spiritual significance. When she appeared beneath a double rainbow at the club’s outrigger-canoe-blessing ceremony, some called her an aumakua, a deified ancestor providing the team good fortune.
Barbieri reviewed video of Uilani logging and considered the dangers monk seals face: Had someone fed her and made her ill? Had she swallowed a fishhook or been thwacked by a propeller? The next day, Barbieri’s team captured Uilani and trucked her to NOAA’s monk seal facility, where they took X-rays and drew blood. As Barbieri ruled out various maladies—no fishhook, no shark bite, no boat-related trauma—the vet began entertaining her worst fear: toxoplasmosis. The disease is caused by a parasitic protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii, and the resulting body-wide tissue inflammation means excruciating pain for the patient, followed by certain death. There is no treatment. Barbieri had flashbacks to RB24, another seal suffering from toxo a few months earlier. That case delivered a double blow to species conservation. Before triggering massive organ failure in RB24, toxo caused the pregnant seal to abort her late-term fetus.
Three days later, Uilani too was dead. A necropsy confirmed toxo.
http://www.outsideonline.com/2127956/feral-cats-are-wreaking-havoc-hawaii
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