A Washington man was arrested for allegedly throwing a rock at a seal in Maui. Witnesses said they confronted a man after seeing him throw the rock and told him they called the police. He reportedly replied that he was “rich enough to pay the fines."

A 38-year-old Washington man has been arrested for allegedly throwing a rock at a monk seal on the shores of Maui in early May, an incident that was caught on video and quickly went viral.

The monk seal is well-known to locals who have named her “Lani.”

Special agents with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration arrested Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk near Seattle on Wednesday, May 13. Lytvynchuk, 38, is a resident of Covington, Wash., roughly 30 miles southeast from Seattle.

On May 5, bystanders took video of a man walking along the beach in the Lahaina area of Maui as he followed a monk seal, Lani, in the nearby shallow water. The seal was swimming and pushing a log. The man then took a large rock — one witness described it as the size of a coconut — and threw it at the seal, nearly hitting its head. The seal was startled and reared out of the water. Lani was motionless for a time, avoiding the shore, after the scare.

    • FrChazzz@lemmus.orgEnglish
      7·
      22 hours ago

      I live on O’ahu and I’ll never forget the first time I encountered a monk seal while surfing. It was near sunset and I was kind of off by myself, away from the rest of the crowd. I heard a sound of heavy breathing from behind me and I thought that maybe someone was paddling up. Nope, it was a seal.

      At first my brain couldn’t make sense of it. I grew up in Florida and so immediately thought it was a manatee (for some reason I thought monk seals were like sea lion size or something smaller and leaner), but I knew this was impossible. Then it yawned and I saw its sizable teeth and realized what it was. It was funny because it was about that time that it realized I was looking at it and it had this “oh shit!” look in its eyes. We gave each other a cautious side-eye just before it went back underwater and swam away.

      These things are big. What would possess someone to think they can approach one is beyond me. A couple years ago there was a story of a lady out swimming in Waikiki and she apparently wandered into an area where a recently born seal was on the beach. The mother messed her up, iirc.