Why Did the Seal Cross the Road? To Get to Connecticut’s Pizza Haven.

It was an unusual 911 call on a Sunday afternoon in New Haven, Conn. At about 2:30 p.m., in a neighborhood full of auto shops, an IKEA and renowned pizzerias, someone reported that a seal was “running back and forth” near a bridge underpass.

When officers from the New Haven Police Department responded, there was the seal, flat on its stomach on a cold, snow-encrusted street in the city’s industrial zone.

No one knows how the seal, a gray male only a few weeks old, wandered so far from its natural ocean habitat. But in a city proud of its pizza scene, some joked it might have been drawn to the specialty slices made in coal-fired ovens. There is even a local specialty that would probably get its seal of approval.

“It was looking for clam pizza,” said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a spokesman for the New Haven Police Department.

“We deal with some weird stuff all the time, but this is certainly out of the ordinary even for us,” he said. “Maybe we should just start keeping mackerel in the cruisers.”

Within 24 hours, the seal had been rescued by volunteers from the Mystic Aquarium’s animal rescue unit. It was given first aid and assigned a temporary name: SYHg2506. The letter S stands for “stranded”; Y is for male; Hg for Halichoerus grypus, his genus and species; 25 for the year 2025; and 06 because this seal was the sixth marine mammal to be reported to the aquarium this year.