Theories but No Answers : Sea Lion Toll Reaches 19; Experts Remain Mystified

The mystery of the dead sea lions widened Tuesday as the 19th carcass in 10 days washed ashore in Huntington Beach, leaving animal lovers and federal biologists perplexed about the rising death toll.

Theories abound, but federal officials say they still cannot tell whether the mammals drowned in fishermen’s nets, were shot or died of disease.

“We’re mystified by this. We really don’t know why or where they’re dying,” said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Marine Fisheries Service in Los Angeles.

Like the other dead mammals, Tuesday’s 4-foot-long, 50-pound specimen had been dead at least 3 weeks--too long for it to be examined for the cause of death, said Cordaro, who told lifeguards to bury it. Cordaro remained hopeful that “a fresh specimen” will turn up.

A live but very ill sea lion was found at nearby Sunset Beach on Saturday. But Cordaro said he does not believe that Saturday’s beaching is related to the other 19 dead sea lions. If many sea lions are dying of disease, Cordaro said, he would expect to find more than one sick animal on shore.

The animal found Saturday died the next day at Sea World in San Diego, where a necropsy Tuesday showed that it died of kidney and liver failure. Sea World spokesman Dan Le Blanc estimated that the sea lion was more than 20 years old and described its condition as “typical of an old sea lion ready to die.”

Some beach-goers have reported seeing what appear to be bullet wounds on several of the 19 carcasses, but Cordaro said such pockmarks could easily have been made by sea birds pecking at the bodies.

And at least four of the bodies were headless, leading some environmentalists to speculate that fishermen had cut the heads off in freeing the mammals from their nets.

But Cordaro said he believes that the heads may have become separated from the decomposing bodies as the dead sea lions bounced in the surf.

“We’re not ruling anything out, but we just don’t want to point to anything,” he said.

Sea lions, gentle-faced creatures with large brown eyes, long whiskers, small ears and flippers, are protected under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, but they are not considered an endangered species. Fishermen are allowed to kill them when the animals “endanger their catch,” said James Lecky, chief of the protected species program at the marine fisheries service.

About 2,600 sea lions die each year from “interaction with fishermen”--sometimes being shot, sometimes getting tangled in nets, Cordaro said.

But even with these losses, sea lions are thriving in waters from San Diego to British Columbia. Lecky and Cordaro estimated their population at 87,000, double that of 10 years ago and growing at the rate of 5,700 a year. At the turn of the century, sea lions became nearly extinct after they were hunted commercially to be rendered into fertilizers and oils, Lecky noted, but their population has since recovered to pre-1900 levels.

Regarded as Pests

There are so many sea lions that fishermen regard them as pests.

“Any place you set a gill net, you’re likely to find a sea lion on the net,” said Nello Castagnola, president of the California Gillnetters Assn., which represents 100 commercial fishermen.

Castagnola estimated that fishermen in the Santa Barbara area, near sea lion rookeries on the Channel Islands, regularly lose 70% of their catch to the mammals. In the Los Angeles-Orange County area, the situation is not as bad, he said; still, fishermen there often lose a third of their catch to sea lions. Typically, a sea lion will swim alongside a net, sometimes jumping into it to feed on the fish and then jumping out again, Castagnola said. But “once in a while, they get careless and they get caught in the net.”

Castagnola, however, doubted that a fisherman would cut off a sea lion’s head to free the tangled and drowned creature from a net. “Why cut his head off when it’s so simple to cut the net? All you have to do is cut off four or five meshes.”

But Judi Jones, director of operations of Friends of the Sea Lion, a Laguna Beach mammal protection group, disagreed. “Sometimes the fishermen will decapitate them, and their bodies will float free,” she said.

Dennis Kelly, a marine biology instructor at Orange Coast College, noted that under the 1972 law fishermen are allowed to kill sea lions only as a last resort. And the fishermen are supposed to file a report with the marine fisheries service. They are also supposed to try to chase the mammals away from the nets first.

“It’s all great on paper,” Kelly said. “But when you get out there and the seas are rolling and sea lions are gulping up the fish, there’s a tendency to avoid steps one and two and jump straight to three.”

Four years ago, he recalled, at least seven injured and dying sea lions came ashore in Newport Beach with bullets in their backs.

Some marine mammal experts recalled other sea lion beachings in recent years but noted that, unlike those in Huntington Beach, the animals came to shore alive.

475 Animals Found in 1983

After harsh storms in the winter of 1983, Sea World in San Diego recovered 475 animals in the area--mostly sea lions and a few harbor and elephant seals, spokesman Le Blanc said. An unusually warm ocean current called El Nino reduced fish supplies off the coast that year, Le Blanc said, and the sea lions recovered by Sea World were malnourished and full of parasites.

Last year in Morro Bay, 28 sea lions came onto the beach with seizures, said Jan Roletto, curator of the California Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. The cause of the seizures remains unknown.

Also last year, the Sausalito center retrieved more than 130 sea lions that beached themselves along the Northern California coast. All were suffering from a bacterial infection called leptospirosis, Roletto said.

Cordaro, of the U.S. Marine Fisheries Service, gave this summary of the recent sea lion beachings in Orange County: two dead animals found on land owned by the city of Huntington Beach on Jan. 21, one found there Jan. 22, one found there Jan. 23 and four found there Jan. 24.

On Jan. 25, three dead sea lions were found at that beach and another three were found at nearby Huntington Beach State Park. On Jan. 26, two were found on the city beach and another was found there Jan. 27. On Jan. 28, one sea lion was found at Huntington Beach State Park and the last dead sea lion was found Tuesday morning at the city beach.