A seal stuck in another seal’s skin was certainly not on OCN’s 2026 bucket list. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Naude Dreyer, a Namibian conservationist, and the amazing people who spend their days working with Ocean Conservation Namibia (OCN) have seen a lot. They spend hours chasing down packs of Cape fur seals that have become trapped in all manner of humanity’s detritus, but on a recent rescue mission, they found something they’d never seen before: a seal trapped not in plastic, fishing line, or nets, but in the skin of a dead seal.
“Little did the team know just how chaotic this run would get,” OCN wrote about the video you see here. “It was absolute madness from start to finish. We had to rush from one entangled seal to the next with zero breathing room, including several massive bull seals with deep, painful neck cuts. But the most bizarre rescue of the day, and perhaps the entire month, was a seal literally trapped inside the discarded skin of another seal.”
Generally, the seals Ocean Conservation Namibia workers find are wrapped in something man-made. OCN patrols a remote stretch of beach near Skeleton Bay that is positively littered in fur seals, many of which have some kind of entanglement. While seals do rarely find themselves stuck in something not tossed away carelessly by us, it’s not something they see much.
“Normally, we would classify this as a natural entanglement,” Dreyer said after they’d cut the skin away. “…It’s not human-induced, but were we wrong to intervene?”
