A New Filing, Not a Reappearance
Bartholomew "Bart" Pruss, Senior Cataloguer · taxonomy / edge-case verification
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, the Senior Cataloguer is asked to take a witness's word for it, and declines.
On the third of September, at Pier 39 in San Francisco, a Steller sea lion of considerable and largely undisputed size hauled himself up among the resident California sea lions, put a dent in the afternoon foot traffic, and was, within the hour, reported by no fewer than three outlets as the return of "Chonkers." I want to be precise about what happened next, because precision is the entire job. Pier 39's own staff went on record, the same day, to say it was not Chonkers. It was a different Steller sea lion, of comparable heft, observed resting in the same spot after what I am told was a productive afternoon of anchovies, and the resemblance ended at the tonnage.
I have no quarrel with the tonnage. Male Stellers of this description run well past a thousand pounds and have been known, at the upper end of the species, to clear a ton, which is the only fact in this dispatch I intend to treat as settled. My quarrel is with the filing. Chonkers, first logged at this same dock in March, was catalogued, correctly, as a known specimen: photographed repeatedly, described consistently, and never once required a caveat in the reporting. This second animal arrived with none of that paperwork. He has a size. He does not yet have a file. The public, eager for a sequel, supplied him with one anyway, and I have seen this before, generally involving a Buick with the wrong hood ornament and a submitter convinced of its provenance.
The catalogue, properly understood, does not promote a resemblance to a record. It opens a new one. I have accordingly declined to amend the Chonkers entry and have instead logged this second sea lion as its own provisional filing, unidentified, pending the kind of dorsal-marking comparison that a dockside crowd with camera phones is not equipped to perform. Should the two ever be confirmed distinct, the publication will have two Stellers on the books instead of one, which strikes me as a better outcome than a single overworked sea lion getting credit for two men's worth of showing up.
The ruling: Thiccc. Entered under Marine Mammals, Unverified, pending re-identification. The tonnage is not in question. The name on the file is.
Filed from the offices, above the dry cleaner, where no one has ever once been mistaken for anyone else who works here.