Hawaii's Plastic Predicament

Plastic waste travels from your doorstep to the most remote places. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, currents concentrate vast amounts of marine debris along the shores of what should be a wildlife paradise. 

Within the protected waters of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, plastic debris and derelict fishing nets threaten endangered Hawaiian Monk Seals (Neomonachus schauinslandi), seabirds, sea turtles and fragile coral reef systems. These islands have become the frontline in the fight against ocean plastics.

In this episode of “Our Wild Lives,” reporter Kaylyn Zipp and Kevin O’Brien from Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project reveal the realities of marine debris cleanup in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. From intense breath-holding training sessions to the successes and ongoing challenges of removing tons of plastic from sensitive habitats, the conversation highlights both the scale of the problem and the lifelong dedication of those working to solve it.

Learn more

Read the full story, “Plastic Prisoners”: https://wildlife.org/plastic-prisoners-2/

Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project (PMDP): https://www.pmdphawaii.org/

“Our Wild Lives” is The Wildlife Society’s biweekly podcast, sharing compelling stories from wildlife professionals doing critical work around the world bringing you thought-provoking conversations with leading experts and emerging voices. 

Cover photo: Thousands of pounds of marine debris collect on the atolls and throughout Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument every year. Photo by Holly Richards / U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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Transcript

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[00:00:00] Kevin OʻBrien: It was just like this mental explosion, like here's this most amazing place I've ever been where wildlife may have never seen a human and yet. You could barely even walk around on the beach for all the plastic. ​

We're talking like tens of thousands of pounds of plastic. And in some places it clutters the beaches so much that the turtles can't find ideal nesting sites 'cause there's too much plastic clutter. 

[00:00:25] Katie Perkins: Welcome to the Our Wild Lives podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society. This episode features special reporting by former TWS policy fellow, Kaylyn Zipp.

This conversation with Kevin O'Brien on marine debris cleanup in Hawaii is one part of her new story, Plastic Prisoners, out now. This is the first edition of our new digital member exclusive stories. You can read the full story in your member portal on wildlife.org or find the link in the show notes under this episode.

To learn more and see all the other benefits of TWS membership, visit [00:01:00] wildlife.org/membership​

[00:01:12] Kevin OʻBrien: So we are the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project. And we're a 501 C3 nonprofit, and we've been around since, uh, about 2020 is when we conducted our first cleanup. But prior to that it was a federal cleanup project, under NOAA Fisheries out here in Honolulu at the Pacific Islands Fishery Science Center. And that's where I worked for 12 years. And James, our executive director, was there for 10 years. And so we, we co-managed the Marine Debris removal project there as part of our NOAA tenure. But it was a case where NOAA Fisheries and our division in particular at NOAA Fisheries, was supposed to be conducting science to inform management and marine debris removal directly from the environment was seen as like a direct management [00:02:00] action. So it was always this hard justification as to why the science agency was conducting a direct management action. However, like NOAA Fisheries you know, absolutely everybody there, we all did our best to justify the project because of this incredible need that the protected area had for this work.

You know, and I think our group there at, uh, at the science center had all the field experience, all the experience you know, diving and boating and operating off ships in remote areas like we had the abilities to do this work, and no one else really did, which is why it always sort of, we were able to justify it. But the problem really was, you know, as a federal program, you can't advocate for your own funding. You just get what you get from the federal budget. And so, unfortunately, you know, throughout the decades, you know, between the late 1990s and when we took over as a nonprofit, the funding had dwindled away to nearly nothing.

And so, unfortunately, the project was going to die unless we [00:03:00] created a new mechanism to keep it going and to, you know, build it up to where it needed to be and to do the cadence of removal that was required to actually address the problem. So, by the end of the NOAA tenure, despite everyone's best intentions, we were only able to do one cleanup project every three years.

And we're really happy to say that now that we're with the nonprofit, we've built it to the point where we're doing. Three every year. So a nine, nine x increase in the cadence of removal. And that's when we really started to see an impact. So that's sort of the history there, you know we saw the writing on the wall and decided to spin up a nonprofit. And that's been the actually a really great place for this project because we're able to seek funding outside of the, you know, normal federal budget, you know, private donors and foundations, and anyone who's really interested can chip in, you know, including, uh, NOAA and a lot of federal money still.

But just from, sort of from a different sector of NOAA continues to support the project. It's been great. All the federal [00:04:00] managing agencies of Papahanaumokuakea of the Sanctuary and it's a national monument. It's National Marine Sanctuary. It's a wildlife refuge, it's a UNESCO World Heritage site. Anyway, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but all the federal and state managers of the area have been incredibly supportive of us here at PMDP and continue to be great collaborators. 

[00:04:19] Kaylyn Zipp: Can you talk to me for a moment about the cultural significance of the place, the ecological significance of the place and really what it means.

[00:04:28] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah, for sure. So Papahanaumokuakea, yeah, you know, it's 10 uninhabited islands, atolls and open ocean reefs. You know, that stretch for another 1300 miles to the northwest of the main Hawaiian islands. So we always say it's the most incredible place on earth and the most amazing part of the Hawaiian island chain that almost no one knows about. Even many people who are born and raised in Hawaii here don't know about it or don't know much about it, may have heard about it, but it's incredibly important you know, from a natural history [00:05:00] standpoint, from a habitat standpoint, for our endangered Hawaiian monk seals, you know, which there are only 1600 left. Found nowhere else in the world and 80% of them reside within Papahanaumokuakea. You know, somewhere between 90 and 94% of all the Hawaiian green sea turtles nest in Papahanaumokuakea you know, you got 14 million seabirds 22 species rely on it for nesting. Terrestrial habitat. It is just an incredibly important place for wildlife. But also interestingly. You know, it's central in some of these, uh, native Hawaiian cultural narratives. And so those islands are known as the Kauna Islands. Kauna means your elders essentially. And so, you know, if you look geologically at the Hawaiian island chain, Hawaii island, which is the big island, is the newest island.

It's still forming. It's the one with the volcano. And then as you go up the chain, the islands get older and older on up into Papahanaumokuakea. So by the time you get [00:06:00] to Hōlanikū, which is the last in the chain. I think it's 28 million years old. So younger islands where all the people live older islands up in Papahanaumokuakea. And, so, you know, the Hawaiians were incredible astronomers and so they, they knew exactly where the tropical of cancer was and that runs, right past an island called Mokumanamana within Papahanaumokuakea, which is, which has, uh, the highest density of Hawaiian cultural sites in the whole state of Hawaii. But it was a very important place for ceremonies surrounding you know, astronomy essentially.

You know, the Azimuts of the sun and stars and all this stuff that played into their skill as navigators and all this stuff. So anyway, above the Tropic of Cancer lies most of the islands within Papahanaumokuakea. And so that is the realm of Poe, which, uh, which is the realm of birth, of death, of darkness and warmth.

That's where everything comes from and where everything goes in death. And then below that line is the realm of Ao. Ao which is the realm of the [00:07:00] light and living, which makes sense 'cause that's where all the people are. And then in Pō is the, is this incredibly important but uninhabited sacred place.

It's an incredible place and you feel the importance of it and the weight of it when you visit. And so, you know, we don't take that lightly.

[00:07:17] Kaylyn Zipp: Can you talk to me a bit about the first time you went out there and, and what that was like and kind of your journey in this space?

[00:07:23] Kevin OʻBrien: Sure. The first time I went out there was in 2007. And I had just graduated undergrad here at University of Hawaii and coming up through college at University of Hawaii, uh, the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, as they were known at the time, was just sort of this like place you always hear about, but think you'll never get to go, you know? No one can just go there recreationally. It has to be a permitted conservation, cultural or management activity to get to even get up there. So you always hear about these amazing reefs and islands, you know, but you'll never have any chance of going there, and so. [00:08:00] I did apply for the NOAA Marine Debris team back in 2007 and miraculously I was hired and so we got to head up there and this was kind of before, this was before, you know, social media, like a ton of stuff was even on the internet really.

I feel like I had no idea what the islands looked like, like I wasn't even, I didn't even Google it, you know, pictured high green Islands with like waterfalls and mountains. And then you get up there and you realize, no, these are low coral atolls with small sandy, sandy islands with shrubby vegetation on them.

Very different from what I thought, you know, and I think that's an experience we don't often have these days is you always kind of, you can go on Google Street view. check out anywhere you're gonna travel and you have, you know what it's gonna look like. But it was like a true adventure. I had no idea what to expect. And so, you know, the first island we arrived at was Ka kale, of Kamo kale, which in English is La Sand Island. And it was just like a beautiful, calm, glassy morning. And we launched our boats off the ship and drove in through the [00:09:00] reef pass up to the beach. And overwhelmed by the smell of the bird guano. Thousands of birds just circling and squawking over the island. And it was like nothing I could have ever imagined. Just the abundance of wildlife, you know, to the point where it inundates all of your senses you know, we landed on the island. And and then at that was just in stark juxtaposition to like how incredibly trashed the shoreline of this island was.

The first one I set foot on. We're talking like tens of thousands of pounds of plastic. And in some places it clutters the beaches so much that can't find ideal nesting sites 'cause there's too much plastic clutter. And so it was just like this mental explosion, like here's this most amazing place I've ever been where wildlife may have never seen a human and yet. You could barely even walk around on the beach for all the plastic. And so it was just like this mental explosion in my mind, like, [00:10:00] wow what a place, but look what it's dealing with. And so that really stuck with me. Honestly, that was 20 years ago, you know? And I'm still doing this work because it was so powerful.

[00:10:11] Kaylyn Zipp: Yeah. So can you talk to me a little bit about, so you have the plastic on the shore, but then you also have the plastic in the water. Can you talk to me a little bit about what that's like and, and the sources of that?

[00:10:24] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. You know, when people think of marine debris, they mostly think of, you know, like plastic straws washing up on the beaches, but not really what it is. I mean, of course there's that too. But for us by weight, the vast majority of what we're dealing with are the derelict fishing nets. Called ghost gear. Or Ghost nets or derelict fishing gear. There's all sorts of trade names in this marine debris circle for it. But you know, these derelict fishing nets they end up on the shoreline certainly, where they're a huge problem because you have a sea turtles, and you'll have Hawaiian monk seals essentially [00:11:00] resting and basking on the shorelines.

And they're all very curious animals, and they'll often like wrap themselves up in it as like a safe, cozy place to take a nap which results oftentimes in entanglement and mortality. So certainly on the shorelines they're an issue, so we're always dealing with that. 

[00:11:15] Kaylyn Zipp: Wow. So a deadly blanket. A deadly blanket, then.

[00:11:19] Kevin OʻBrien: That's good. I've

[00:11:20] Kaylyn Zipp: Yeah.

[00:11:20] Kevin OʻBrien: That way. Yeah a deadly. Blanket to nap in which is the same in the water, honestly. But anyway, the stuff washes in from the open ocean

[00:11:28] Kaylyn Zipp: Yes.

[00:11:29] Kevin OʻBrien: The reef structure of the northwestern Hawaiian islands is quite different than that of the main Hawaiian islands. You know, the main Hawaiian islands are high, rocky islands with fringing reefs or right, right next to the shoreline for the most part. the northwestern Hawaiian islands are much older. So you've had atoll formation where the rock island sinks away over time, and the coral reef stays at the surface. So you have these coral atolls, which are giant rings of coral, you know, with calm lagoons in the center.

And so the issue there is that these big masses of derelict [00:12:00] fishing net will wash in from the open ocean, come over the surf around in the barrier reef, you know, the surf around the barrier reef. They'll come through the surf. Sometimes they'll rip off coral heads on the way and then make their way into these calm lagoons, which are filled with like delicate coral gardens in some cases, then snag on this delicate coral.

And so you have two problems. One that net is now accessible to seals that are using the lagoons for nesting, resting, basking, you know, especially pups that might be in that sheltered environment. They're also curious in the water. So they'll go swim around in it, tangle themselves up in it just for fun, play with it, and then oftentimes get tangled. But then you have the issue of the coral damage. These things cause, so when they snag up on the coral, if they snag up well enough. They'll get stuck for a while if they just barely snag, you know, wave action or storm action will rip 'em off. Oftentimes, it'll rip off a coral head or break a coral head or flip it over or something on its way [00:13:00] through.

But if it gets stuck well enough, then it stays put and it begins to bifo and gets algae growing on the net. And then at that point it goes from being a massive buoyant net to a negatively buoyant net, and it sinks and plasters itself onto the living coral. And so what that does, obviously coral needs sunlight. To survive. And so it shade, it shades out the coral underneath. So a lot of times when we find these nets that plastered on the coral and we carefully peel them off the reef and underneath is this big scar of just pure dead white coral substrate. And so that's an impact that isn't often seen, you know, in the media, in photos, there's always turtles with straws sticking out of their noses and seals tangled in nets. But for us, a huge factor is this coral impact. So, so we focus on in water nets, in the water primarily, like that's our bread and butter when we do these cleanups.

[00:13:58] Kaylyn Zipp: So why here?

[00:13:59] Kevin OʻBrien: [00:14:00] Why

[00:14:00] Kaylyn Zipp: Of all places? Yeah. Why does it happen here?

[00:14:03] Kevin OʻBrien: I think you have the perfect storm of factors. Number one, these are remote uninhabited islands, so you don't have anyone there ever to keep up with the problem, to slowly clean up, you know, like I live enough to a beach that, I'm out there pretty frequently and you have all sorts of people walking the beach every morning picking up everything that they see.

Every little net that washes up, gets dragged up to the road, you know, like that kind of thing. But in Papahanaumokuakea, literally no one ever doing this until we show up with our team. So, that's one problem. The second problem is that these islands sit just in the wrong place in the North Pacific.

So they sit in the north central part of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which is this giant clockwise turning current in the North Pacific. And so you have that combined with some of these bigger garbage patch features and the North Pacific [00:15:00] subtropical convergence zones, just these oceanographic features that tend to sort of just trap debris and accumulate it in these open ocean settings.

And so Papahanaumokuakea sits far enough north that it gets influenced by the North Pacific garbage patch and the subtropical convergence zone. And so seasonally, certainly, and then on some longer timescales too with the El Nino, La Nina cycles, uh, Papahanaumokuakea gets hit with high concentrations of plastics and the islands just sort of filter it out like a big comb, so the accumulation there is just off the charts. And then when you combine that with the third factor that this is like incredibly important habitat for super sensitive wildlife, you have the perfect storm of a problem really hard to deal with mostly because the place is so remote, expensive to get to and and difficult so.

[00:15:53] Kaylyn Zipp: So tell me what it's like when you guys go out on the boats, you know, what are your teams like? How do you focus, do you do land [00:16:00] missions and then ocean missions? How does that all work?

[00:16:02] Kevin OʻBrien: Sure. So we we go out three times a year. We'll put together our team. Our team for the field consists of 16 people because that's actually the max number of people that we can legally put on the ship that we use. We charter a vessel. It's 180 foot supply vessel, like a big floating pickup truck, has tons of room on deck for our fleet of 19 foot zodiac boats and big dumpster bins and deck space to pile up a bunch of this debris and stuff.

And so it's the perfect platform. So we'll put together a team of 16 people. Every two years, we'll hire a new cohort and put them through a couple months of training. You know, because we're so remote, like many of these places we work up there, take four to five days to get to on the ship. I mean, you can be anywhere from 24 to 72 hours away from medical help. So our teams have to be super well-trained. Everybody becomes a really competent boat operator, a very safe free diver. [00:17:00] Everyone's trained in advanced remote medical, among among a bunch of other stuff, and we really invest heavily in our teams and get 'em really well trained up before we go out to such a remote place. So when we do, we'll go out on the ship for a month at a time. We'll load all our zodiacs

On there. Everybody lives on the ship like a floating hotel. And then we will essentially island hop cleaning up different locations along the way as we go. So when we get to a, an island, an atoll that we're gonna work for a while. The ship essentially just drifts outside the reef. We never anchor. It's a very sensitive, protected area, so the ship never touches bottom, it just drifts outside the reef. We launch our boats over the side with the crane. Every morning, four boats go out with four people on each boat. We'll drive, you know, usually through a reef, pass into the interior of the atoll and then go to our work site where we clean up for the day.

And so what that looks like is either we'll clean a shoreline. Which is pretty standard, like everybody's pretty familiar with how you [00:18:00] do a beach cleanup. But in our case, we have to get everything to an accessible shoreline where we could load it all into one of our boats. So sometimes you're carrying and dragging things for a mile or two to get to an accessible, uh, spot on the shoreline.

[00:18:15] Kaylyn Zipp: It sounds like kind of a military operation. Do you guys have like maps and things that you guys have like drawn out or how does that work?

[00:18:23] Kevin OʻBrien: We use a lot of GIS for our operational planning, so we'll have all our routes to get our boats through crazy mazes of coral reef or through surf passes or whatever, and then we'll. We log all the areas we've surveyed on GIS so we can plan, you know, where to go next based on elapsed, time of accumulation and stuff like that.

So it's either shoreline or we'll go for in water cleanup, which is, you know, like I said, our bread and butter. So that's essentially surveying reefs. And so, we do that in two ways. We can either tow a diver behind the boat on a tow board. It's like an underwater wing, right? And boat follows a search pattern like mowing a [00:19:00] lawn, towing divers behind.

They're visually scanning the bottom and the reef for any net snagged on the coral. And when they find a net, they'll come up, stop the boat. Boat will circle back. The divers will get to work, removing it from the bottom, pull it up into the boat, and then keep going. Then the other method we use, which is our primary method, which is just sending two swimmers out and they'll swim a search pattern on the reef. Some of the reef structures don't lend themselves well to towing over. So those reefs, which we call reticulated reefs will swim with the divers. Free divers, I might add no tanks.

[00:19:34] Kaylyn Zipp: Yeah, what is it like to free dive for these nets, and that must be dangerous.

[00:19:41] Kevin OʻBrien: It is, it adds a little element of risk. However, scuba diving also adds risk in a different way. And we've come to the conclusion that the free diving method actually poses less risk than if we were to do this on scuba. Not to mention the fact that it's just operationally way more effective, you know?

So [00:20:00] we find most of these nets. Between zero and 30 feet deep, the majority of those are between zero and 10 feet deep. So you're not talking about crazy depths. Diving's one of those things where if you get the right training, you can get really good at it really fast, even if you've never done it.

[00:20:17] Kaylyn Zipp: What's the training like? 

[00:20:18] Kevin OʻBrien: It's mostly, uh, centered around breathing techniques to do it safely. You know, you avoid hyperventilating. There's all these breathe up techniques to lower your heart rate, before you go down on a dive. So we'll have people that we hire, who ] have maybe never even done diving free diving for depth before, and they'll go from to being able to hit 10 feet to hitting 60, 70 feet in two days of training.

[00:20:44] Kaylyn Zipp: Wow,

[00:20:45] Kevin OʻBrien: And so, we have people that can hold their breath for seven minutes. And so you get a team like that together, you don't really even need tanks and they're just clunky and get in the way and use up space on the boat. And so, but obviously,

[00:20:56] Kaylyn Zipp: You guys are kinda like mermaids.

[00:20:58] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:59] Kaylyn Zipp: Mermaid. [00:21:00] Yeah.

[00:21:00] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. Exactly. No, they would love to hear you say that. Um,

[00:21:06] Kaylyn Zipp: That's awesome.

[00:21:07] Kevin OʻBrien: So it makes a lot of sense. You're going up and down, right? Yeah. You're, you're working in buddy teams. One person's always up watching safety diver, one person's down, working, cutting very carefully, peeling these nets off the living coral, so as not to cause more damage. And then you're tying lines on 'em, and then you're hauling them up to the side of the boat. You know, sometimes the nets can weigh thousands and thousands of pounds. We had one one time that was 22,000 pounds for a single massive net.

[00:21:34] Kaylyn Zipp: Wow.

[00:21:35] Kevin OʻBrien: So in, in those cases, you have to spend time cutting it into smaller chunks that are more manageable, and then you're hauling those chunks into the zodiac boat, you know, maybe a thousand pounds at a time. And our boats can carry about 4,000 pounds of payload. So by the end of a day of surveying and cutting and lifting, you'll have, you know, 3000 plus pounds of net in your boat. You take that back to the ship. We offload that with the crane into our big bins on [00:22:00] the deck, and then crane the boats on board and get up, do it all over again the next day. 

[00:22:06] Kaylyn Zipp: Wow.

[00:22:07] Kevin OʻBrien: So

[00:22:08] Kaylyn Zipp: When you're pulling those nets, obviously. Are you finding things in the nets? Do you see things? Yeah.

[00:22:15] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. We find a lot of bones, like a lot of animals that have been killed by the net. We find a lot of. Turtle bones, fish bones sharks, that kind of thing. But mostly turtles. They're the primary victims I guess you would say that we see the most tangled up in these things.

And you know, every year there'll be a handful of turtles that we'll stumble across that are actually still alive. We're able to like cut free and release. But you know, for everyone that we see, it's such a vast area that for everyone that we see once a year, there's probably a hundred or a thousand more that we never see. But our goal is getting this stuff out of the environment, minimizing the amount of stuff available for them to get tangled in. We'll then have those downstream effects and minimize the number that are ultimately [00:23:00] entangled. And actually, we just were co-authors on a paper in Science last year that for the first time was able to quantify, you know, essentially like the entanglement rates of juvenile seals to our level of effort and correlate that to a reduction in entanglement, which was kind of cool 'cause you know, we always knew it was having an impact, but this is the first time that we were able to see that scientifically.

[00:23:24] Kaylyn Zipp: How did that feel to know that you, like you could put a number to your impact?

[00:23:29] Kevin OʻBrien: It was great

[00:23:29] Kaylyn Zipp: Your team must have been really excited.

[00:23:31] Kevin OʻBrien: It's a struggle with all our work, you know, is like, how do you communicate to everybody? No one can visit this place. No one can see it. No one can be there, no one can witness these entanglements. How do you communicate to people, first of all the problem and what it really feels like on the ground, then how do you communicate to people the impact you're having when you can go up there and you can see it? You know, I think the cool thing is that. When we first started PMDP back in 2020, there was essentially, [00:24:00] you know, like a million pound backlog of marine debris in theory by the calculations. Since 2006 of just the unfortunate results of dwindling federal effort doing this work, there was a growing backlog. And so in 2020 we had a big task ahead of us to catch up with that backlog, and we had estimated that we would catch up with the, the visible and accessible portion of that backlog by 2027. And that's actually really coming true because this past summer. For the first time we came back with less, despite a similar level of effort. And so that to me was the indicator like, oh, this is working. We're, you know, it's gonna get harder and harder to come back with huge amounts of this stuff because, you know, we've caught up with all this super dense backlog. You know, you swim 50 feet and there's another net. You swim 50 feet and there's another net caught up with all that historic backlog, and now we're just dealing with new fresh annual accumulation, which is [00:25:00] obviously spread out over the same amount of area.

It's just less dense, and so it's gonna require more swimming. It's gonna require us to develop new technologies, which we're working on pretty hard right now terms of drone detection, satellite detection, and then possibly unmanned surface or underwater vehicles to sort of map and detect and geolocate nets for our divers then to go seek and destroy. And

[00:25:24] Kaylyn Zipp: That's awesome.

[00:25:25] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah, so we're working on like phase two of PMVP, which is really like, all right, now that we're dealing with new stuff, annual accumulation, like how do we optimize our operation to be the most effective at doing that? So it's kind of exciting stuff. 

[00:25:41] Kaylyn Zipp: And so when you're doing your beach cleanups, are you coming across entangled animals and things like that? And how do you deal with that if you do?

[00:25:48] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. So we do, yes. Short answer is yes, could be an entangled Haiwaiian monk seal or entangled green sea turtle. We are collaborators with NOAA Fisheries Protected Species Division, and [00:26:00] so we're on all the permits to be able to handle these animals. And we have all the training from the federal government to be, to be doing those activities. And so yeah, we have capability and the authorization to just get in there and take care of the situation. So disentangling the seals and turtles and seabirds too, they get tangled in this stuff.

[00:26:19] Kaylyn Zipp: What's it like to disentangle a seal or a bird or sea turtle? 

[00:26:24] Kevin OʻBrien: Yeah. Turtles are pretty easy. Usually they're entangled in the water and so it's a case of our one, you know, one diver will go up and hold the carapus, hold the turtle still, while the other person very carefully cuts the net, the netting free. We use surgical shears so we don't cut the animal and we have a whole protocol. A seal is very different. I mean, yeah, you have to be very careful around these animals. If you look at their dentition, it's, it looks like a wolf, so getting bit by one of these animals is not something we wanna do. We also don't wanna traumatize the animal or disturb it too much. And so there's a whole protocol developed by the federal [00:27:00] government for handling these animals and restraining them while you do cut an entanglement hazard off.

And so we follow that protocol in consultation with NOAA, like every, before we do one of these interventions, we will obviously call the protected species division at NOAA. They walk us through any considerations and then our trained personnel will go execute based on their guidance. And so it's a real careful process to do that, to do something like that because this is a highly endangered animal. And so we take that super seriously.

[00:27:31] Kaylyn Zipp: Yeah. And you know, what do the wounds look like? I mean, I imagine there's different levels of entanglement that you're seeing.

[00:27:37] Kevin OʻBrien: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It can be anything from like a fresh entanglement will just be something loosely wrapped around their neck or a flipper in the case of a turtle. Uh, but then the ones that have been there longer are pretty gruesome sometimes. Sometimes um, you know, it's cut off the circulation to an appendage, to the point where the appendage is necrotic. Or in the case of a seal entanglement, maybe the seal was [00:28:00] entangled when it was a juvenile and it's since grown and that's continued to restrict the growth of the animal and their skin can be split and it can be pretty gruesome. 'Cause once this stuff gets on there, like it's made of very strong plastic fibers and it's not coming off unless it gets cut off. And so you have some pretty, gruesome entanglements. Man, are these animals resilient? Some of these seals that have gotten these entanglements, you know, just, and there's enough science going on by the federal monk seal program. To recite these animals based on their tag numbers and stuff, so we could see like the same seal that we, you know, cut a net off of.

They'll recite it the next year and we can confirm, okay, this thing survived. It's awesome. Like it, it's still

[00:28:43] Kaylyn Zipp: Wow.

[00:28:44] Kevin OʻBrien: Trucking along despite some of these gruesome injuries that I don't know how they heal up without antibiotics, but it really illustrates how weak the human system is when you see a seal that should just die from a massive infection. It's, it, a year later, it's still there. Just a big old scar, you know? [00:29:00] So that,

[00:29:01] Kaylyn Zipp: So impressive.

[00:29:02] Kevin OʻBrien: So in that sense, it's always really, uh, it feels good, like knowing that, you know, many times these animals will survive. So, yeah.

[00:29:10] Kaylyn Zipp: That's amazing. To kind of finish off, what do you want people to know or think or do that are listening to this?

[00:29:20] Kevin OʻBrien: Sure. I mean, I think, I mean, with social media, like everything's, there's just so much out there, right? There's so much doom and gloom about our environment. It just, I think people's eyes have started to glaze over because they're just inundated with doom and gloom. Like we're wrecking the environment, we're destroying it, and I, we like to lead with a different message.

First of all, here's this incredible protected area that is so important for so much wildlife. It's just like places like this, don't exist very often anymore, like where you can set foot on a beach and a seabird will land on your head because it's never seen a human. [00:30:00] Or you can stand in knee deep water and have a hundred pound fish circling your ankles because they've never seen a hook or a line, a place where you feel like you're stepping back in time. Maybe back to one of these pre-contact islands, you know, where, I don't know. It just it's so incredibly amazing that we like to just. Say like, look, here's this amazing place. Check it out. Get to know it. Like, here's a bunch of photos that we've taken of the place. It is so incredible.

It's totally worth our efforts. Right? And then obviously you have to then hit 'em with the problem. It's like, here's this amazing place, but it suffers from this crazy problem with marine debris accumulation and coral death and wildlife entanglement. But we're actually doing it like we're out there. We made a huge dent in this, and we're really starting to see the results downstream of our intensive efforts over the last five years.

Like, we're getting this done, like it's working like a success story or a story of [00:31:00] hope you know, that we can show with the data. And so I think that feels good to people to hear that, and I really hope that we can communicate the hope in our efforts, at least that if you put enough time and effort into one thing and protecting what you love, that you can really make a difference.

I know that sounds like so corny, but we're making a real dent and I think it's one of those few success stories out there with some of these real nebulous environmental problems that nobody knows how to solve. Like, I, uh, have a friend, he's a fellow boat instructor for the federal boating course, and he lives in Idaho and. He's boating on rivers and stuff. Anyway, he comes out here sometimes for, to teach boating classes with us. And he was present time when we came back with a big shipload of full of marine debris. And he says to me, he goes, Kevin, it's really good to have a job where you get to make piles. And I was like, huh.

Wow. That really resonates with me. I love that. Right. You could get done with a day of [00:32:00] science and you might have some data on your hard drive, and I think that's really satisfying for some people, but for me, that doesn't float my boat, you know? And so at the end of a day of doing this, we have a giant pile of hazardous material that we've removed from the environment. And he says, yeah, I like to spend my weekend chopping wood, you know, and then go out there on Monday morning with my cup of coffee on my deck and sit out there and stare at the pile of wood I chopped. I was like, man, you get me. That's exactly what makes this work really satisfying. I think I, that's rare, I guess, in science is to have, have those tangible results at the end of every day that are so tangible that you can see it making a difference right there in real time.

So anyway.

[00:32:46] Kaylyn Zipp: That's awesome. No, that that's, that was great. And this has been amazing. I'm so excited to have gotten you on.

[00:32:52] Kevin OʻBrien: Actually, sorry. Can I add one more thing?

We do hire new cohorts every year to do this work. It's super competitive, but, [00:33:00] just wanna tell people, you know, spring of 2027, stay tuned with us, follow our social media or go to the website or whatever.

But we're gonna be putting out a recruitment in 2027 for the field team. So usually like, um, somebody that's just immediately post undergrad. Is really interested in this type of work. You know, young, strong. ' cause

[00:33:21] Kaylyn Zipp: yeah.

[00:33:22] Kevin OʻBrien: It's grueling on your body.

[00:33:23] Kaylyn Zipp: Yep.

[00:33:24] Kevin OʻBrien: But anybody can apply. You know, if you're interested

[00:33:27] Kaylyn Zipp: Yeah,

[00:33:27] Kevin OʻBrien: Work, there's ways to get involved. again, it's like super competitive, but um, say never.

[00:33:34] Kaylyn Zipp: never say never. I love it.

[00:33:46] Katie Perkins: You've been listening to the Our Wild Lives Podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society. If you're loving the show, we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a review or shoot us a message at the link in the description box. You [00:34:00] can learn more about The Wildlife Society at wildlife.org and on our social media pages @TheWildlifeSociety. We'll see you next week with more stories from the wild.