ABSTRACT
MOm/Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal, 18 Solomou str, 10682, Athens, Greece. Email: info@mom.gr
* Corresponding author: p.dendrinos@mom.gr
In his 4th century B.C. seminal work the “History of Animals”, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, penned the first known description of a pinniped in history. Aristotle described the only pinniped species inhabiting the Mediterranean Sea, the Mediterranean monk seal, which he encountered along the coasts of the Aegean Sea in Greece. The first description of this seal in modern times was published in 1779 by the German naturalist Johann Hermann (Hermann 1779). Hermann described the Mediterranean monk seal from an animal in a traveling exhibition in Strasbourg. Actually, Hermann is also responsible for naming the species a “monk seal”. He came up with this name by combining the fact that around the area of Marseilles locals seemed to refer to the species with the name “moine” (monk in French), with the fact that the animal he had seen in Strasbourg resembled a monk wearing a cloak. It is unknown to us how many Mediterranean monk seals lived in Aristotle’s world, or even Hermann’s, but today the species is considered to be one of the rarest marine mammals and the most endangered seal on Earth. It is estimated that no more than 700 individual Mediterranean monk seals survive today (Karamanlidis and Dendrinos 2015, Karamanlidis et al. 2016a).
