NOAA report<\/a>, the agency fined a tourist $1,500 for\u00a0“harassing” a\u00a0monk seal and sea turtle on the Hawaiian island of Kau’i.\u00a0 NOAA is the federal agency responsible for the enforcement of federal laws protecting\u00a0marine mammals, which includes the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).\u00a0\u00a0Hawaiian monk seals and sea turtles are protected by both laws, which, among other things, prohibit “harassment.”\u00a0 There reportedly are only 1,400 of the seals left in the wild.<\/p>\nAccording to NOAA, the unidentified man walked up to a sleeping monk seal and stroked it with his hand causing the animal to awaken at which point the man ran away.\u00a0 That was the extent of the interaction.\u00a0 OLE was able to track the man down through local volunteers who monitor monk seals and because he posted a video of the incident on Instagram, titling the posting “I touched a seal!!!!”\u00a0and utilizing the hashtag #monkseal, which caught the agency’s intention.\u00a0 This, in turn, led to the discovery of another “problematic” video\u00a0 of the same man “aggressively” pursuing a protected sea turtle for an extended period of time while snorkeling.<\/p>\n
Once confronted by OLE, the man evidently was “cooperative,” accepted responsibility and paid a $1,500 fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by John M. Simpson. A recent action\u00a0by the Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) illustrates how seriously the agency takes incidents of “harassing” protected species.\u00a0 According to a NOAA report, the agency fined a tourist $1,500 for\u00a0“harassing” a\u00a0monk seal and sea turtle on the Hawaiian island of Kau’i.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6,105,5,11,106,73],"ppma_author":[697],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-endangered-species-act","tag-harass","tag-john-simpson","tag-marine-mammal-protection-act","tag-monk-seal","tag-national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration"],"authors":[{"term_id":697,"user_id":317,"is_guest":0,"slug":"jmsimpson","display_name":"John M. Simpson","avatar_url":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/38\/2018\/06\/simpsonjohn-125x150.jpg","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}