Baby seal stranded in Montauk dies

Despite his caretakers' 'round-the-clock attention, the high hopes of those who discovered him and a legion of Facebook friends rooting for him, the gray seal pup found stranded on a beach in Montauk last month, known to many as Ozzy, has died of an infection.

The seal, which weighed 30 to 35 pounds, took a turn for the worse recently when he began to show signs of an aggressive infection, and died Monday at about 9 p.m., said Kim Durham, rescue program director at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation.

"A week ago there was really no indication that he had an infection," she said Tuesday after conducting a necropsy, adding that it appeared his liver was most compromised. She said that on Saturday Ozzy became less responsive - a sign of worry for biologists who expect their healthy charges to be more boisterous, perhaps eager to get back into the wild.

She said Ozzy, who was barely two days old when he was spotted and brought to the Riverhead Foundation on Feb. 12, fought against dehydration and infection, and his biologists put him on a regimen of antibiotics they hoped would clear up the infection.

He was also on a diet of fish slurry and cod liver oil, a fatty meal they had hoped would substitute for the nutrients and bacteria-fighting immunity that he would have gotten from his mother if she had nursed him. Ozzy was discovered with his umbilical cord still attached.

"We recognized that we would have a challenging time mimicking what mom would have been able to give him," she said.