So we have two New Zealand Fur Seal pups in, one came in yesterday, one this morning and
they were brought both in by a DOC ranger because they were alerted by the public that
the pup seals were actually on the beach and they didn't look too well.
So this morning we brought both of them in to the hospital to do a full exam to see how
their organs are doing and how their general condition is and we took some x-rays from
the first one, the reason that we take the x-rays is mainly to see if there's any fish hook
that might sit in the stomach and might be a reason why they're actually having a problem.
The second one is definitely much much stronger than the first one, was giving us a good fight
and it actually only has a wound in the head but also small bleeding in the eye.
For now we're just going to run the bloods, they're going to the lab this morning and
we should have results from that in the afternoon and based on these results we're just going
to make a plan of what needs to be done, what treatments do they need and what is the prognosis.
So we've got two New Zealand fur pups in with us, so these are two wild orphans. The young
male is really skinny so he needs to feed up, he's on medication for his head wounds
and his eye problems. We'll be able to fix his physical health and then it'll be determining
whether he's fit for release. One of the problems we deal with fur seal pups is if they spend
a lot of time around people sometimes they become too tame to release. Obviously our
main aim with these is to fix these wild animals and get them back into the wild, but if for
any reason we're unable to get them back into the wild successfully then we can offer them
a long-term home here at Auckland Zoo. So we've also got a young six month old female
New Zealand fur seal pup so she's really really sick, she's on a drip and we're feeding her
lots of medication. We've got a specialist coming in later today that's going to ultrasound
scan her abdomen and see if we can't work out why she's so sick. We know that she's
got lung worm and intestinal worms and that will make her a bit sick. Normally not quite
this bad so we're trying everything we can for her to give her every chance that we can, we need
to clip the hair off this area and that's going to allow the ultrasonographer to do
a scan of her abdomen and see if there's anything bad going on inside.
I wanted to update you on both seal pups that we've had in so unfortunately both seals passed
away. The young female was critically ill and we almost expected her to die but we tried
really really hard and unfortunately she had an unfixable problem, actually multiple problems.
Both had severe parasite infestations, although we'd already treated for the parasites, the
level of damage in their lungs that we saw in post-mortem probably wasn't reparable and
in addition to that of course we've got animals that have basically been slowly starving to
death in the wild. This isn't a physical problem that we can see, but actually what's happening
is lots of metabolic problems that are happening so the sugar, the electrolytes are all out
of balance and that creates havoc with almost all of the internal organs.
The boy we were more hopeful about, he was bright and eating, but actually after a few
days he also deteriorated and we had to make the sad decision to euthanise him. We were
all really sad, the vet team and the keeper teams, about that but this is not uncommon when we're
dealing with wildlife. The majority of wild animals by the time they come into the clinic
they're already really really sick.
The reason we at Auckland Zoo help endangered
wildlife is because of the human impact on the wild animals, so many of these seals and
birds that we deal with have been negatively impacted by us, by humans, and so we want
to try and help to reverse that. So if you see sick seals the most important thing to
do is look but don't touch, stay 10 or 20 metres away, you can take some time and observe
them. More often than not it's juvenile pups that have left their parents and they're doing
okay but if you are concerned then you need to phone the DOC hotline number and let the
specialists come and assess and if they think it's a seal that needs veterinary care then
they'll get in touch with us.