Friday Frontiers 12-7-18

New Feature! Tune in every Friday for a story from the frontiers of marine science–new and exciting information, papers, or observations that are happening around the world.

To kick things off, we need to travel to our neighbor to the south, Hawaii, where scientists on remote islands noticed something strange was happening to the monk seals they were studying…they had eels stuck in their noses.

A juvenile Hawaiian monk seal with an eel stuck in its nose. (Photo Credit: Brittany Dolan/NOAA Fisheries)

If phocid seals can quite dexterously use their fore-flippers to manipulate large prey items as we know from Renae’s cool paper, why do you think these monk seals can’t pull the eels out of their noses?

Read more about this strange sighting here:

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