Recent sightings of a seal in the Yarra River have sparked excitement among Melbourne locals and revived memories of “Salvatore” from the city’s prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns.
Zaynab Malik, a resident of inner-city Melbourne, said she spotted the seal frolicking near Point Park along the River Esplanade in Docklands about 9.30am on Monday.
“At first, I thought it was a dolphin. Because all I saw was [what looked like] this huge fin. He was zooming down the river and disappeared from view in under three minutes. I got pretty excited,” Malik told Guardian Australia.
“I always thought Salvatore stayed around Abbotsford, so it was a lovely surprise to start the day.”
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Another Melbourne local, Jesse Harrison, spotted the seal just after 3pm on the same day, further up the Yarra near Hoddle Bridge.
“I have never seen him before,” Harrison said. “I wasn’t sure whether this was a common occurrence in the Yarra, but … after a bit of Googling … figured I had probably seen Salvatore.”
The name “Salvatore” came to be associated with seals seen in Melbourne’s rivers after a large male Australian fur seal was rescued when it became entangled in box tape in the Maribyrnong River in 2015.
Mark Keenan, from Zoos Victoria’s marine response unit, said Salvatore the First bore particular deep scars on his neck from that entanglement that made him easily identifiable.
“We caught that animal and brought it into the zoo, removed the entanglement, and released the animal at Werribee South,” Keenan said. He was unsure who in the wildlife community first called this seal Salvatore, but the name stuck.
Salvatore the First was regularly seen in Melbourne’s river systems for a couple of years after his rescue, getting very strong and fat thanks to being the only large predator in the waterways, before disappearing around 2019.
The seal that appeared in the Yarra during Covid lockdowns was a different one, but bore many similarities to Salvatore the First. Along with inheriting the name of his predecessor, Salvatore the Second was also an enormous adult male fur seal.
Seals are independent foragers and can thrive in rivers where there is little competition for food, said Keenan, and there have been unconfirmed reports of seals travelling as far up the Yarra as Healesville.
“Our biggest concern when we see seals in river systems is that obviously they tend to be highly populated and there are lots of risk factors that otherwise aren’t necessarily present in the ocean, including litter and boat traffic,” Keenan said.
Male Australian fur seals usually live for about 10 years. The seal seen this week is unlikely to be either of the previously observed individuals, but that hasn’t stopped people finding joy in Salvatore the Third.
Short videos of the seal captured by Malik and Harrison this week were reshared by @seally_friend, an Instagram account devoted to collating the exploits of Melbourne’s river seal.
Tessa McDonnell, a Melbourne tattoo artist who began the @seally_friend account in 2021, told Guardian Australia she had often wondered whether sightings of Salvatore would bring people the same level of elation outside lockdown, but said her inbox had been “going bananas” since resharing the videos.
“The way people respond to his sighting is amazing,” McDonnell said. “When we were all confined to our homes and had little to focus on, the magical sighting was the escape everyone needed. Now we all have all shifted back into a sense of normalcy, the sighting of the seal perhaps harkens back to a time we had all sort of forgotten about, a bright star in a dark time.”
