SR3
The sound of a five piece kazoo ensemble met our ears. We stepped carefully in a black plastic bus tub filled with an inch of disinfectant and ducked into the tent. We craned our necks to get our first glimpse of the musicians – a quintet of harbor seal pups being rehabilitated by Sealife Response, Rehab + Research (SR3) – singing for their supper.
I peered over the edge of a large, blue plastic bin with a tag that read “Griffin PV5”. Inside a white harbor seal pup with brownish-gray spots and earnest eyes peered back at me. He blinked sleepily and bleated on his little toy of a voice box. He was curled up on a baby blue boppy with a playful dog print. A light blue hat tag with the number 5 was glued to the top of his head.
Casey Mclean had told us Griffin’s story in the exam room portion of our tour. An x-ray of Griffin’s chest showed an enlarged esophagus. His condition didn’t allow him to keep food down, and would starve him to death without treatment. “Any guesses how we might treat this?” Mclean asked around but we shook our heads, no one had any idea.
“Viagra!” she exclaimed. “If we give him viagra right before his feedings, the sphincter at the bottom of his esophagus closes and keeps the food in his stomach long enough for him to digest it.”
We laughed, shaking our heads in disbelief. “How many times will this drug be reinvented?” she wondered aloud, eliciting another laugh. “We’re cautiously optimistic, but so far it’s working! We heard about this treatment from a marine mammal center in British Columbia – it had worked for them with two different patients. So we’re giving it a try.”
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Since witnessing the release of Dragon last month, SR3’s first harbor seal pup patient of 2024, I’ve stayed in touch with the organization, learning more about their work. Casey Mclean – marine biologist, veterinary nurse and executive director at SR3 – invited me to join a behind the scenes tour of the organization’s facility in the DesMoines Marina, just south of SeaTac.
Our tour began at the ambulance parked outside the windscreen wrapped hurricane fencing that delineated SR3’s facility from the rest of the marina parking lot that housed it. “When we need to transport a sick or injured animal to our facility, this is how we do it,” Mclean shared, thumping the open back door of the rig.
The ambulance is climate controlled, allows for treatment and monitoring enroute, and can be hosed out at the end of a dirty ride. But, Mclean noted, “It’s a bumpy ride.” The organization would love to have a patient transport vehicle with all of this functionality that moves more smoothly. “These animals are either abandoned newborns or injured or sick. They’re being handled by humans. They’re under enough stress,” she added.
“And no,” Mclean seemed to read the delusion I was entertaining in that very moment, “we don’t get to run the lights for these guys. They work, but we’d get pulled over real fast.”
We followed her into the fenced compound. It consisted of a double-wide trailer, two outdoor saltwater pools, a necropsy trailer, the salination and filtration systems for the pools, and the tent in which the infant animals are kept and cared for until they’re ready to be outdoors with the adults.
We started on the far end of the double-wide, in the fish kitchen. Mclean explained that the adult patients are fed small fish, mostly herring and some anchovies. “The Tribe generously donated salmon to us a couple years ago, but our patients didn’t know what to do with it – it was too big for them,” Casey laughed.
She held up a large syringe with a long tube attached. “This is our tubing equipment. This is how we feed the pups,” she said. “They’re too distractible to bottle feed, and they eat four to five times a day. We could never get enough in them any other way.”
Harbor seal pups wean in four to six weeks postpartum, and in that time, they more than double their weight. SR3’s harbor seal pup patients tend to come in underweight or as newborns. “In these first weeks when they should still be nursing, we have to put weight on them as quickly as possible,” Mclean emphasized. Their formula is 40% fat. “And we add more fat to that,” she said.
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We stepped into a bin of disinfectant as we left the fish kitchen and followed Mclean past an office through a kitchen and dining area (with a note on the fridge declaring, “NO FISH! Human food only!”), and, after stepping in another bin of disinfectant, into the exam and treatment room. A life size plush harbor seal was staged on the exam and operating table.
Mclean turned our attention to their handheld x-ray device and then to a domed and chambered x-ray of a sea turtle projected on a screen. She pointed out their anesthesia machine. A canine anesthesia cone was affixed to the plush seal. She explained how marine mammals behave differently under anesthesia than land mammals because of their dive reflex. “We have to be really careful,” she commented. “Sometimes they dive and we can’t get them back.”
Marine veterinary doctors attend veterinary school and then complete an additional several-years-long training after that – intern and externships, post-doctoral studies, and field work – to learn such nuances of marine animal medicine and research. Mclean noted that, as the only facility of their kind in the Pacific Northwest, SR3 works closely with governmental agencies and collaboratively with other organizations doing similar work in different locations. “We share data, we share best practices,” she told us. “It’s really exciting to be in our position because the data that we collect here from our patients and the research that we’re doing directly impacts conservation policy. It’s making a difference.”
We left the exam room through an exterior door that deposited us in front of the twelve and eight foot pools where adult patients are kept. An adult harbor seal eyed us from the enclosure’s corner. “Just keep moving past,” Mclean urged us, “These guys are curious creatures but at this point in their rehabilitation, we’re trying to make sure they’re not too familiar with humans.”
Save the corner from which their fish was flung into their pool, opaque, perforated plastic sheeting around its perimeter shielded the harbor seals in the smaller of the two pools from our view. We walked by quickly and tried not to make eye contact without entirely missing the inquisitive pinniped, head cocked, eyes bright.
We passed the necropsy trailer, and in a somber moment considered how many animals came to this facility and were not released after a few months. The organization has great success with its patients, and still. On a white board in the main room of the double-wide I’d noticed a column for patient outcomes. Most of the twenty or so 2024 patients on the board were still at the facility; a good number had been released; three had died, one upon arrival.
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And finally, we were at the door of the pup tent. The moment I had been waiting for. Their kazooing voices – cries for food, Mclean explained, audible to their mothers from distances up to a kilometer – sounded hilariously unreal.
I considered Griffin first, eyes filling with tears immediately upon adjusting, knowing that if the little blue pill doesn’t deliver for this little guy, he’ll end up in the necropsy trailer rather than back on the hunt in the Salish Sea. He bleated up at me and I held his gaze for a long moment, wishing him well, thanking Mclean, her colleagues, and her donors for loving the depths of this place deeply. For caring for Griffin and the four other pups who harmonized with him despite their blue crate quarantine.
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Continued next week.
