06/25/2026
A rare and heartwarming sight: a Hawaiian monk seal and her pup. Every new pup is a hopeful step forward for one of the world's most endangered marine mammals. 🦭✨
A Hawaiian monk seal born at Midway Atoll swam roughly 1,500 miles down the length of the Hawaiian archipelago and in 2001 gave birth to the first monk seal pup ever recorded on Hawai'i Island.
NOAA Fisheries documented the full journey. The seal was designated RS00 and known as Ewa Girl, ewa being a Hawaiian word for wandering. She was born in 1992 on Spit, the smallest islet at Midway, which sits at the far northwestern end of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, about as remote as the Hawaiian chain gets. Biologists tagged her as a weaned pup on April 28 of that year. Her mother's identity was never determined.
For five years she stayed in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Then in 1997, at age five, just as she was reaching adulthood, she left. She moved southeast to Kamole, which is Laysan Island, and stayed there for two years. Then she kept going, turning up at Moloka'i, then Kaua'i, then all the way down to Hawai'i Island, the southeasternmost island in the chain. Other monk seals had made the crossing from the Northwestern Islands to the main islands before, but they had departed from much closer sites like Nihoa, Necker, or French Frigate Shoals. Ewa Girl started at Midway. Her total journey covered about 2,400 kilometers. NOAA called it off the charts.
Hawaiian monk seals exist nowhere else on earth and number roughly 1,600 animals, about a third of their historic population. They are one of the most endangered seal species in the world. The population had been declining for six decades before it finally turned around in 2013, and even now the number required to downlist them from endangered to threatened is more than double the current count. Every female that breeds matters to the arithmetic of the species, and Ewa Girl bred.
At Kamilo, near South Point on Hawai'i Island, she had the pup that NOAA confirmed as the first monk seal birth ever documented on that island. She later moved again and pupped on Ni'ihau, then settled on O'ahu, where she gave birth at Mānana Island and at Reef Runway. Nine pups total in the main Hawaiian Islands. NOAA had to remove fishing hooks from her twice along the way, which is one of the more common interventions the agency runs for monk seals and one of the reasons biologists want every sighting reported.
Her fourth pup, a female called Sadie, was born on O'ahu in 2007. Sadie grew up, disappeared for years the way monk seals sometimes do, then surfaced pregnant and had her first known pup in 2013 on the same offshore island where she had been born. The following year Sadie gave birth to Pua, who vanished in turn as a five-month-old and was not seen again for five years. In 2019, a NOAA team went out to identify an unknown mother seal that had pupped on an island off O'ahu and found that it was Pua, alive and nursing.
That made four generations descending from a single seal who had walked herself across the entire archipelago. Ewa Girl was last sighted in 2014, at age twenty-two. Whether she is still alive is unknown but the line she started is still producing pups.
Source: NOAA Fisheries, Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program / NOAA Fisheries feature, "RS00: The Seal Who Journeyed Across the Archipelago" / NOAA Fisheries, "Four Generations of Hawaiian Monk Seals."
