Hawaii Magazine
Experience Ke Kai Ola, a hospital for Hawaiian monk seals, on its 2.5 hour walking tour.
Jan 26, 2021
There’s a dry-erase board at Ke Kai Ola, a monk seal hospital at Keāhole Point, with the names of its Hawaiian monk seal patients, where they’re from, when they arrived and their weights, both on arrival and now.
One look at this chart and you can see the impact this hospital, built by the California-based Marine Mammal Center, has had since it opened in 2014.
Hilina‘i, an emaciated monk seal pup rescued in September 2019 from the Pearl and Hermes Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, arrived weighing 57 pounds. Six months later, she’s 162 pounds. (Monk seals can weigh 200 pounds at 6 weeks old; adults weigh between 400 and 600 pounds.) Since 2014, the hospital has released nearly 30 healthy monk seals back into the wild.