My afternoon chasing an Internet star

I spent some time on the beach this afternoon training with HMSRTO volunteers, learning more about monk seals and what volunteers do when looking for seals along the shore, as well as how they handle crowds at the beach while the seals sleep. There were four seals spotted in the White Plains vicinity today, but when I walked the beaches I saw just two. One very exciting siting - at least for me - was to see Kermit, a popular 12 year old, 500+ pound male seal who has been outfitted with a data transmitter for the past three months. On the Monk Seal Mania blog, they regularly post the data maps that are transmitted from that device. For fun on that blog, they call the device the "iKermit." It has provided the scientists and volunteers a ton of really fascinating data. For example, his deepest dive (for food) was 750 ft (an average dive is 150 ft). And when he ventured from Oahu to Kauai last month? Took him 21 hours and he literally swam in a straight line. (How's THAT for an internal GPS system?!) Here he is out in the water off Nimitz Beach earlier today. We followed him from the shore for a quarter of a mile, looking to see if he would haul out again, but he just kept swimming west.