5 Dead Sea Lions Found; Toll 54

Five more dead sea lions have washed ashore at Seal Beach and Newport Beach within the last week, bringing the total to at least 54 since January.

One washed ashore in Newport Beach and three others in Seal Beach on Thursday, officials said. Lifeguards said the bodies were badly decomposed.

Seal Beach lifeguard Paul Carter said he found the decomposed head of a sea lion on shore last Saturday.

“I’m not a biologist, but you could tell it was severed,” Carter said, adding that he suspected the head had been sliced with some type of blade. “The skin was pretty clean and not jaggedy,” he said.

But Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist at the National Marine and Fisheries Service office in Los Angeles, said that in cases of natural decomposition, “it’s almost impossible to determine if a head was removed from the body unless you actually see someone sever a head from an animal.”

“As the animal is rolled around by the surf, the head is snapping back and forth, and it doesn’t take very long for the head to be severed from the body,” he said.

Cordaro believes that the sea lions drowned after becoming entangled in fishermen’s gill nets. About 2,600 sea lions die each year along the West Coast from “interaction with fishermen,” he said, adding that a few hundred wash ashore while most wash out to sea.

“Based on our estimation of the number of sea lions that die every year as a result of interaction with fishermen and the number that wash ashore, it’s a small sample of the total number,” he said. “We really don’t feel there is a need for concern at this point.”

Last month, federal and private biologists said they believed that most of the 48 sea lions beached in county waters from mid-January to early February died after encounters with fishermen--either drowning after becoming entangled in nets or shot by squid fishermen protecting their catch.

They ruled out disease as a primary cause of death because most of the sea lions were dead when they washed ashore. Diseased or malnourished sea lions usually struggle to the shore alive.

Sea lions are protected under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, but they are not listed as an endangered species.

Cordaro estimated that there are 67,000 to 107,00 sea lions along the Southern California coast and that about 5,600 pups are born each year.