[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 8/21/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment 

 

August 21, 2007

 

2. Supply

 

 

Marine Mammal Center saves 600 sea lions a year

Santa Cruz Sentinel – 8/21/07

By TOM RAGAN
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

 

WATSONVILLE — Doug Ross stares, then crouches, then brings the net down, capturing what appears to be a sick California sea lion near Pajaro Dunes.

 

With the help of his fellow volunteers, Anje Vandernaald and Katharine Parker, he manages to gently drag the male sea lion into a nearby cage, where the sea lion is eventually hauled off to the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito to the marine mammal hospital.

Blood will be drawn there, and the sea lion will be examined by a veterinarian who hopefully will get to the bottom of his illness.

"This was a definite pickup. There's no doubt about it," Ross says after a brief struggle with the sea lion last week. "It was lying in the middle of the beach with all these people around, and it wasn't moving. He'd been like that for two hours. Something was wrong with him. We just don't know what"

 

Not a day goes by that someone doesn't call one of the center's three hot lines to report a sea lion that's either sick, entangled in fishing gear, injured from a great white shark or dying due to bullet wounds from a disgruntled fisherman.

 

But there's a growing school of thought that perhaps the weaker sea lions — those who succumb to domoic acid, inexplicably fall ill or simply don't have the hunting skills — should be left to fend for themselves.

 

Nature, they say, should take its course as a form of population control.

 

"We need to let natural survival carry itself out," said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service and a stranding coordinator who's seen the sea lion population steadily rise, as much as 6 percent per year. "And if we don't allow it to happen, the population is going to get so big that there's going to be a massive die-off"

 

At last count there were roughly 300,000 California sea lions swimming up and down the Pacific Coast, from Baja California to as far north as Canada. That's a far cry from the 2,000 to 3,000 sea lions that existed in 1972, dismal numbers that helped usher in the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Cordaro said.

 

Since then, the court of public opinion on the burgeoning population varies, from outright disgust among fishermen who have to compete with them, to utter joy from rescuers who see new science and hope in saving them.

 

"They're the canary in the coal mine," says Sue Andrews, a field manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Moss Landing, which fields calls on sick marine mammals daily. "Their health can tell us a lot about the state of the ocean and our surroundings. What impacts us, impacts them, like shellfish poisoning. That's just one example"

 

But fishermen have issues with the healthier sea lions, the ones who steal their potential catch by either grabbing it off the lines in the ocean or swimming 140 miles inland to the Columbia River in Oregon. There, each spring they wait for the spring chinook to return.

"It's a feast," notes Robert Stansell, whose job as a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is to count the spring chinook consumed by the sea lions at the Bonneville Dam in Oregon.

 

As it is, there's a movement afoot to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act so that some of the sea lions can be killed, or "legally taken," Stansell said.

 

A decision is expected by spring, he said.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the enforcer of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, will weigh the recommendations made in the coming months by an 18-member task force whose membership comprises the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

 

Although he's not a member of the task force, Stansell said as many as 100 sea lions appear each year at the dam over the course of several months — beginning as early as January and lasting until early summer.

 

He says he doesn't have an opinion on the matter, but adds that scaring them off with explosives, otherwise known as "hazing," might be a worthy alternative to killing them.

 

Andrews, of the Marie Mammal Center in Moss Landing, is willing to accept hazing them but not killing.

 

"They don't eat nearly as many fish as fishermen take," she said. "We are obviously opposed to killing sea lions. Human interaction is as much as hazard to them as anything else. I'm not God. I don't get to judge how many are too many or too little, that's God's job. But saving them, the way we see it, is their beneficial payback for suffering from human interaction for so long"

 

As for "Lashes," the sea lion that was captured on the beach at Pajaro Dunes, his cloudy eyes have since cleared and the center is still awaiting blood results, Andrews said.#

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/August/21/local/stories/01local.htm