Working USB stick found in leopard seal poo. Owner found!

ByCraig Haley

The durability of a USB stick has been extensively tested recently by a hungry leopard seal, demonstrating that these sturdy little storage devices would take quite a battering for them to lose your important data.

USB sticks are a great way to back up your information. They can store tons of data, you can encrypt the data on them, and as we now know, they’re extremely durable.

It all started in November 2017 when scientists working on the New Zealand coastline collected a sample of leopard seal scat (that’s poo to the rest of us.) You see, leopard seal poo provides the scientific community invaluable insight into the lives of this particular marine animal, including how long they’ve been living on the New Zealand coast, their diet and their health.


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The poo sample was sitting in a freezer at the Crown Research Institute until it was defrosted this January for examination. Two researchers waded into the sample, separating bones, seaweed and other nasty things you’d expect to see in leopard seal poo until, to their surprise, the perfectly functional USB stick revealed itself.

Not only was the USB stick physically intact, so was the data held within it. The stick had apparently survived both being in the water and being exposed to the digestion system of a New Zealand leopard seal. Not only that, but it contained several photos and videos too, and New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) posted one such video found on the USB stick (below) in a bid to find the owner.

That video went viral, and only a handful of days later, the owner came forward to be reunited with her videos.

It’s a pretty cool story, and a testament to the durability and reliability of USB sticks to back-up your data. It may not be World Back-Up Day until the end of March, but this tale serves as a good reminder that you should always back-up your stuff, and USB sticks are clearly one great way to do that (providing you don’t lose them to a hungry leopard seal, that is!)

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