Steller’s Sea-Cow: A Brief Interaction with Humans
In 1741, an expedition was launched by the Russians, to map a northern sea route from Russia to North America. Mid-way through the journey, a great storm separated one of the ships, the St. Peter, from the expedition. The ship, led by Captain Vitus Bering, came to anchor on a desolate and barren island in the Northern Pacific Ocean later known as Bering Island. The sailors were trapped there and the St. Peter was too damaged to make the journey back to Russia. Then, to their amazement, they came across a new species, like nothing most of them had ever seen before. This discovery allowed for their survival on the island, but led to the extinction of the very species that had saved them.
What the sailors had spotted was a huge manatee-like creature, up to 10 metres long, larger than a killer whale and ranging from 8,000-10,000kg, with a large, round, grey body, a tail and flippers vaguely resembling that of a seal, and a large down-turned nose or snout. The Steller’s sea cow: otherwise known as the Hydrodamalis Gigas. It was a part of the Sirenian family, along with its cousin, the manatee. Sirenian, derives from the Sirens of Greek mythology; from the legends of lonely sailors mistaking these cow-like creatures for mermaids or sirens, which seems strange considering that mermaids are supposed to be half beautiful women, and the sea cow looks more like a mix between an ugly seal and an elephant!
The Steller’s Sea Cow lived in the cold shallow waters around the island, feeding mainly on the kelp that grew like long grass in the ocean. Exceptional for its massive size and appearance, as well as its gentle nature, the sea-cow was truly an unforgettable discovery. The sailors soon learnt more about these huge creatures, most importantly that they made an excellent food source. Due to their docility, and the fact that they lived in herds, the sea-cow was an easy target. The meat of one animal could keep around 30 sailors alive for over a month, and their fat could be used as a substitute for butter, or for lighting oil lamps. The sailors survived on these creatures and kept track of their numbers (there were around 1,000-2,000 creatures on the island). One sailor in particular, Georg Steller, a German zoologist and the Steller sea-cow’s namesake, took particular notice in them. He studied and even carried out dissections of them, keeping notes of their appearance and habits. “The animal never comes out on shore”, he wrote, “but always lives in the water. Its skin is black and thick like the bark of an old oak.” He also described their “uncommon love for one another, which even extended so far that, when one of them was hooked, all the others were intent upon saving him.”
Eventually, the sailors left the island. Captain Bering died from scurvy and Steller along with a few other crew-members, constructed a small boat and escaped back to Russia. The sailors brought with them stories of the Steller Sea-cow and essentially doomed the species. Word of the sea-cow spread and over time more sailors set out to the island of Bering, they hunted the sea-cow for its meat, invaluable for long journeys at sea, and lived off the sea-cow when hunting sea-otters. The sea-cow was easy prey, and by 1768, it had been hunted into extinction. Less than thirty years after its discovery, the Steller Sea-Cow had vanished.
This was caused by a combination of two factors: the rate at which the beasts were hunted, which was simply too fast for the species to reproduce, and the hunting of sea-otters. Sea-otters feed on sea urchins, causing a rise in the number of sea urchins who in turn ate up the kelp, and starved the sea-cows to death. Undoubtedly, humans were to blame.
The extinction of the Steller’s sea cow has been a valuable lesson to humanity. Not only in the science of extinction, the way in which the hunting of one species can lead to the death of another, but also on the responsibility that humans have to species like the sea-cow. We must take this as a lesson, one of many, on the terrible destructive power against nature that humans have, and that whatever happens, we must endeavour to prevent adding to the expanding list of animals, like Steller’s sea cow, which are gone forever.