Countywide : 15 Dead Sea Lions Wash Up in 2 Weeks

About 15 sea lions have washed ashore in Orange County in the last two weeks, but local officials said Monday that there is no cause for alarm.

Joe Delgado, a beach supervisor at Newport Beach, said that three sea lion carcasses were found on Sunday and that they were buried Monday morning where they were found.

Dead sea lions “are a common sight on the beach,” Delgado said.

Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries service in Los Angeles, said that at this point the numbers of dead sea lions are nothing to worry about.

“If it keeps building to, let’s say, about 50 in two weeks,” he said, “then we can say it’s because of some commercial fishing” or a widespread disease among the mammals.

Judi Jones, the director of operations for the Friends of the Sea Lion Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, also said she was not alarmed by the numbers. But she added that the carcasses found over the last 14 days were too decomposed for authorities to perform necropsies.

“I don’t think anyone really knows why these died,” Jones said.

She said the badly decomposed carcasses indicate the sea lions might have been dead for some time but have only now washed ashore.

Last year, 47 dead sea lions were found in two weeks, most of them victims of encounters with fishermen. Cordaro attributed last year’s abnormal number of dead sea lions to an unusual concentration in Huntington Beach of squid, which attracted commercial fishermen with gill nets that fatally trapped sea lions, gray whales and dolphins.