An endangered Hawaiian monk seal was spotted with an eel lodged up its nostril in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The Honolulu-based Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program (HMSRP), part of the United States' NOAA Fisheries agency, posted a photo on its Facebook page Monday that showed a seal with the slippery creature lodged firmly in its right nostril.
This undignified incident is just the latest in a long (and wriggly) line of eel invasions to strike the Hawaiian monk seals -- a phenomenon that was first spotted in the summer of 2016 off Hawaii's Lisianski Island.
"Mondays ... it might not have been a good one for you but it had to have been better than an eel in your nose," the HMSRP joked on its Facebook page.
The Hawaiian monk seal is one of the rarest seal species in the world and is classed as endangered in the US. The majority of the population lives around eight remote islands of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and it was estimated in 2016 that only 1,427 animals remain.
Scientists are concerned the eels could carry infections and may hamper the seals from diving.
"We have reported on this phenomenon before, which was first noted a few years back. We have now found juvenile seals with eels stuck in their noses on multiple occasions," the HMSRP added.
Charles Littnan, the HMSRP's lead scientist, noted that researchers are still baffled by the phenomenon.
"We've been intensively monitoring monk seals for four decades and in all of that time, nothing like this has happened," he told The Guardian. "Now it's happened three or four times and we have no idea why."
The NOAA has proposed two hypotheses: first, that eels launch themselves defensively at the seals while they are foraging for food, shoving their mouths and noses into the crevices of coral reefs and under rocks.