Motiti Island fur seals appear to be surviving the oil that has washed ashore from the Rena wreck.

Oiled Wildlife Response team member Brian Gibson says there are teams out on Motiti Island every day and have not seen 'anything untoward”.

A seal found on Motiti Island covered in oil.

'They do say that if they find seals they assess them and if they are oiled and look in distress they will be brought back to the centre – even if they were to find one lightly oiled, but looked in good health.

'Otherwise, they would leave them because it does more harm than good to move them sometimes.

'Apparently they can look after themselves pretty well if it's not too bad.”

Graeme Butler.

Butler's Swim With Dolphins skipper Graeme Butler says he would typically see about two dozen fur seal on the northern Motiti coasts at this time of year, plus another 30 or more on Plate Island.

'Department of Conservation saw five of them that had oil on them,” says Graeme.

'The difficulties of three guys in a little DOC boat rescuing seals off Plate Island would be like shoving butter up a porcupine's arse with a hot pin – fairly hopeless.”

On a typical day on the Gemini Galaxsea Graeme says you would see two or three seals on the Astrolabe Reef, more on the Schooner Rocks and several scattered among rocks on the island's rugged north eastern coast.

'If you go and do a seal count there would probably be more than that,” says Graeme. 'They get right in the little fissures and cracks and hide.”

Graeme says if the seals and other marine life have left Motiti because of the oil, there may be more pressure on the food supply further afield.

Marine mammals do naturally what farmers do with rotational grazing.

'They gravitate towards food seasonally and they get into feeding patterns and habits that are fairly harmonious,” says Graeme.

'When a huge area like this is taken out of the mix, the animals that are grazing on it, the whales, seals, dolphins and such, are pushed into other areas where they might create an imbalance; not enough food.

'The whales in particular would be compromised at this time of the year if they had to share food with other whales this would depend on whether there's any available.

'That's my concern. I heard from the politicians this week, the whales are smart enough just to go away.

'If you said the same thing to a dairy farmers, who have 100 acres and suddenly 20 acres of grass is suddenly no good, you can't just push his cattle into the surrounding grass that he's got left and assume that they are going to milk the same and that they are not going to be stressed.”

Container Wreckage washing ashore at Motiti Island at the weekend.

As a matter of perspective Graeme says the amount of fish affected by Rena's fuel oil probably would not fill the toe of the net of the Korean trawler that sank off the South Island recently.

The number of oiled sea birds killed by Rena's oil is probably a similar number to what gets killed in the Southern Ocean each season as by catch caused by fishing practices, and the Motiti fur seals are not nearly the number of 60 Hooker Sea Lions that are permitted to be killed each year by the fishing industry.