A viral video of a seal attacking a young Gqeberha child before turning its attention to an American actress may have tongues wagging, but the scars run deep for the seven-year-old boy, who is now too afraid to step back onto the beach.
The mother of the Sardinia Bay child, bitten by the Cape fur seal at Cape Town’s Clifton Beach, described the frightening incident.
Experts have also pointed to several possible reasons the seal attacked the boy, including that it was little more than a pup itself, was panicked by the large crowd, and the possibility that it had ingested a biotoxin that damaged its brain.
Albert Skein, 7, a Grey Junior School pupil, was playing in the shallows at Clifton when the yearling — recently weaned and not much more than a year old — attacked him.
His mom, Claudia Skein, said nobody had disturbed the seal and it had not been there long before things went awry.
“The incident happened at about midday. This baby seal had appeared in the shallow water and everyone was saying how cute it was.
“My youngest boy was close by and suddenly the seal went straight for him, trying to bite his legs.
“I screamed and froze but my husband, Frederick, rushed in and picked up my son and at the same time many other people tried to help, including three or four lifesavers, who were wonderful.
“The lifesavers took Frederick and Albert to the lifesaver hut and cleaned their wounds.
“Frederick had been bitten a couple of times on the arm and Albert the same, but my son’s wounds were deeper.”
She said they had driven to a pharmacy, where her husband got a tetanus jab.
Albert had received one in 2022, so he could not have another so soon.
She said she had been impressed by everyone’s caring attitude.
“The Cape Town coastal manager and the deputy mayor both phoned to see how we were.
“It was only the next day when I saw the video that I became quite shaken.
“The seal was little, but it was very quick and we thank God it was not worse.”
The family used to live in Cape Town and continued to visit there once a year but they had never heard about such an incident, she said.
“Albert is a bit traumatised. He cries now and then and asks why the seal bit him.
“He says he doesn’t want to go to the beach again.
“We have told him the baby seal was maybe lost and bit him because it was scared.
“But now we are trying not to talk about it too much.”
Skein said no-one had disturbed the seal.
“It was all quite quick between the time it appeared and the time of the incident.
“People were looking at it and taking photographs. They weren’t trying to touch it.”
After the seal attacked Albert, it latched onto a woman who was swimming further out and who did not hear the yells to get out the water.
It bit American actress LouLou Taylor several times on both hands before an onlooker grabbed it by its tail and flipper and tossed it into deeper water, after which it disappeared.
Taylor is known for her roles in Raised by Wolves, Detour, and Farah Goes Bang.
Bayworld marine biologist and seal specialist Dr Greg Hofmeyr said further investigation was needed to determine the reason for the highly unusual attack and to unpack the circumstances before and during the incident.
“From the video you can see the seal is a yearling so therefore born a little over a year ago and weaned in November.
“Typically these youngsters struggle a bit, so any time from November through to April you’ll see them coming ashore often thin and exhausted and sometimes in inappropriate spots where there are lots of people.
“Some feel threatened if you venture too close, and react aggressively.
“But the way the one in the video persists in going for the boy and then the other bather is odd.
“So either there was a human-caused stress that we don’t know about or it was biotoxin domoic acid, as has been suggested, or another pollutant.”
He said he was not aware of any recent harmful algal blooms of the kind needed to generate the domoic acid.
“So if it was that, then it would have been a while ago when this yearling ingested it via milk from his mother after she fed on fish that fed on the toxic algae.”
He said animals also had different characters and this had to be considered.
“In 2003, a scientist colleague and I were on Bouvet Island in the Southern Ocean and we were attacked by a female Antarctic fur seal though we posed no threat and all the hundreds of other females in the colony were ignoring us.
“She knocked him down, took a bite out his pants and we ran like hell.
“I think she previously had a bad encounter with humans.”
Asked about the Clifton incident, veteran University of Pretoria seal researcher Prof Marthan Bester said sky-high marine pollution levels pointed to a range of possible triggers.
In a similarly bizarre incident in October in Fish Hoek, a seal came out the water and attacked a person sitting on the sand.
Also in October, The Herald’s sister newspaper, Sunday Times, quoted Dr Tess Gridley of Cape Town marine research group Sea Search saying she had seen more seal bites in that six-month period than in the previous 20 years.
Gridley believed domoic acid could be to blame and pointed to high levels of the biotoxin found in Californian sea lions and how it appeared to affect their behaviour.
According to the National Sea Rescue Institute, domoic acid had been linked to the unusual number of Cape fur seal die-offs over recent years and the thinking was the aggressive seals had received light doses of it.
It was suspected that this could result in brain damage and heightened aggression, similar to a dog with rabies, though the disease was not passed on.
HeraldLIVE
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.