Amanda Nally

The owner of a USB memory card, which was found in a pile of leopard seal scat, has been located. 

Last week we posted about USB memory card that was buried in a pile of leopard seal scat near Oreti Beach on New Zealand’s southern island. The card appeared to have been swallowed by the leopard seal, digested, excreted, collected and then frozen for a year in a freezer before being discovered by a naturalist examining the seal scat. Remarkably, the card was still functional and using the images and video on the card the volunteers at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) used social media to try and find the owner.

It turns out that the card belongs to Amanda Nally, the volunteer who collected the scat in the first place. So, she must have dropped the card and it got somehow buried in the seal poop. A simple enough, if still somewhat messy, explanation.  Or maybe not.

From here the story gets a bit weird. As reported by the Guardian: NIWA scientists are convinced the tale is even stranger and more unlikely.

“The USB stick was embedded deep in the poo. NIWA are convinced that a bird ate my USB stick, and the leopard seal then ate the bird, because he had a lot of feathers in the scat. And then bizarrely I come along and say ‘oh there’s a sample we should send to NIWA’,” Nally said. A Niwa spokesperson confirmed the theory….

Nally is aware how strange this string of events is. “This is probably the weirdest set of coincidences in my life – ever.”