Dead Sea Lions Wash Up in Orange County

Three more dead sea lions washed ashore in Orange County Wednesday, bringing to 23 the number of beached carcasses found in the last two weeks.

One dead sea lion was found in Huntington Beach Wednesday morning, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Another washed up in Sunset Beach and a third in the Surfside area of Seal Beach, the agency reported.

The first of the dead mammals washed ashore at Huntington Beach on Jan. 21, and one or more new bodies have drifted ashore virtually every day since then, said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service office in Los Angeles. Before Wednesday, all of the dead animals were found at Huntington Beach.

Some marine mammal experts recalled other sea lion beachings in recent years but noted that they had come to shore alive.

“We still don’t know what is killing them or where at sea they are dying,” Cordaro said. He added that he does not think sharks have caused any of the deaths. “If the sea lions had been attacked by sharks, you’d see whole sections torn from their bodies, and we haven’t seen this.” he said.

Cordaro said the sea lion found at Huntington Beach on Wednesday washed ashore about half a mile south of the Huntington Beach Pier.

“This was a sea lion 1 to 2 years old,” he said. “Most of the head was missing. It was a very decomposed body.”

A 4-foot-long, 50-pound sea lion found Tuesday at Huntington Beach had been dead at least three weeks.

A sick sea lion was found at Sunset Beach on Saturday, but Cordaro said he did not believe that beaching was related to the other deaths.

That animal died of kidney and liver failure Sunday at Sea World in San Diego. A Sea World spokesman estimated that the animal 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 they thought were bullet wounds on several of the carcasses, but Cordaro said sea birds could have made the holes.

Several headless sea lions have been found, leading some environmentalists to speculate that fishermen had cut the heads off while freeing the mammals from nets.

But Cordaro said the heads may separate from the decomposing bodies in the surf.

Sea lions are protected under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. Fishermen are allowed to kill them when they endanger their catch, said James Lecky, chief of the protected species program at the National Marine Fisheries Service.

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

Still, sea lions are thriving from San Diego to British Columbia. Their population is estimated at 87,000, double that of 10 years ago and growing by 5,700 a year. Sea lions were nearly extinct at the turn of the century because of commercial hunting.

The animals are so plentiful now that fishermen regard them as pests. But Nello Castagnola, president of the California Gillnetters Assn., which represents 100 commercial fishermen, said he doubts that a fisherman would cut off a sea lion’s head to free it from a net.