The quotes from this Washington Post article are funny, sure, but here’s a longer quote about some of the theories behind this phenomenon:
“A seal’s preferred prey — usually fish, octopuses and, of course, eels — like to hide within coral reefs to avoid being eaten, and since the marine mammals don’t have hands, they have to hunt with their faces.
“They like to stick their faces into the coral reef holes, and they’ll spit water out of their mouths to flush things out. And they’ll do all sorts of tricks, but they are shoving their faces into holes,” Littnan said.
Perhaps, he said, a cornered eel decided that the only way to escape or defend itself was to swim up its attacker’s nostril, and young seals who are “not very adept at getting their food yet” were forced to learn a tough lesson.
But Littnan said that theory doesn’t make much sense.
“They’re really quite long eels, and their diameter is probably close to what it would be for a nasal passage,” he said.
He added that a monk seal’s nostrils, which reflexively close when they are diving for food, are very muscular and it would be difficult for any animal to push through.
“I struggle to think of an eel really wanting to force its way into a nose,” he said.
The other way eels might be ending up in nostrils is through throwing up. Similar to how people sometimes end up accidentally spewing food or beverages from their noses, that could also happen to seals, who often regurgitate their meals.
Still, Littnan said it doesn’t seem possible that a “long, fat eel” would end up going through a seal’s nose rather than out of its mouth. The “most plausible” theory, he said, is that monk seal teenagers aren’t all that different from their human counterparts. Monk seals “seem naturally attracted to getting into troublesome situations,” Littnan said.”
So while it’s possible that this is some sort of ridiculous teenage seal behavior, please also remember that there might be alternate explanations and that at this point, they’re all based on conjecture.
Also, it’s criminal that OP didn’t screenshot the last line of the article.
“If monk seals could understand humans, Littnan said he has a message for them: ‘I would gently plead for them to stop.’“
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