A leopard seal which hundreds of spectators visited has died, A Hutt City Councillor says.<\/p>\n
Councillor Brady Dyer said the seal died on Sunday night, and will be removed by the Department of Conservation (DOC) on Monday.<\/p>\n
Conservationists echoed the news on social media, saying they suspected the seal looked unwell.<\/p>\n
DOC has been approached for comment. Staff had previously expected the seal to return to the water when it was ready.<\/p>\n
“[In] the last few years, this is probably the third one that I’ve seen. We had a massive, huge leopard seal in Oriental Parade by the boat sheds for a time,” DOC ranger Melody McLaughlin told RNZ a week ago.<\/p>\n
“He’s perfectly happy having the snooze on the beach here, and he will go when he’s good and ready to go back into the water.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A leopard seal which hundreds of spectators visited has died, A Hutt City Councillor says. Councillor Brady Dyer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-599405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}