Officials Approve Killing of Problem Sea Lions

Officials have tried every trick in the book to discourage, intimidate, annoy, exasperate or terrify them. But a small gang of sea lion toughs has remained unperturbed, slipping year after year back to the Ballard Ship Locks at Lake Washington to feast on free fish.

First, officials tried throwing firecrackers at them. They installed a barrier net. They injected foul-tasting lithium chloride into the fish. They shot rubber-tipped arrows at them, chased them in long-distance boats, hazed them with chain saws near shore, even played tapes of killer whale sounds in a last-ditch bid to inspire sea lion fear.

A hardy few, who came to be known as the “Bad Boys of Ballard,” kept coming back. In 1990, six of the worst offenders were shipped south to the coast of Santa Barbara. One of them was back in 30 days; two others swam in two weeks later. Last year, the state spent $120,000 building a holding pen for the most brazen of the bunch, 870-pound Hondo, and held him throughout the steelhead trout spawning season, releasing him in June.

Guess who showed up in January at the Ballard Locks? This time, Hondo is 1,100 pounds and quite used to the game. He’s shown no inclination to jump into the state’s floating traps, no fear of the 200-decibel acoustic barrier. Hondo is huge, hungry and fearless--and, apparently, doomed.

On Wednesday, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that it was authorizing “lethal removal” of predatory sea lions at the Ballard Locks, clearing the way for the first legal killing of sea lions for predator control along the Pacific coast since passage of the 24-year-old Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Significantly easing earlier conditions, federal officials issued a new letter of authorization that will allow the state of Washington to begin holding planning sessions for the first executions--probably by lethal injection--as early as next week.

Officials said that at least two of the worst predators meet all of the conditions for removal immediately; two others that have not yet actually been seen eating a steelhead, but are considered quite likely to, given their past conduct, will probably qualify soon.

In all, up to five of the sea lions are the kind of repeat offenders most likely to be subject to removal under the regulations, authorities said.

“The bottom line is not to say these other methods don’t work. They don’t work on certain animals,” said Fisheries Service official Joe Scordino. Past efforts to temporarily detain Hondo, he said, have made the situation worse.

“Now he’s older, he’s smarter, he knows how to avoid the traps,” Scordino said, adding that there is an increasing likelihood that the most audacious of the sea lions will teach hundreds of others who have held back from the noisy acoustic barrier that they can proceed with impunity.

“If we don’t move to permanently remove those animals who have learned this behavior, we’re compounding the problem,” he said.

The issue has put environmental groups at odds with one another over what species carries the most importance in the Pacific Northwest--the sea lion, whose origins are farther south, or the steelhead, one of several species of seasonally spawning fish that, like the salmon, serve as reminders of the historic runs of wild fish that once choked the lakes and streams of the region.

There has been a dramatic decline in steelhead returning to Lake Washington to spawn in recent years. Where once there was an annual return of about 1,600 fish, only 70 returning steelhead were counted in 1994, the lowest return on record. The Fisheries Service said the crash in steelhead populations corresponded with the arrival of sea lions at the Ballard Locks in the mid-1980s.

The sea lion population, meanwhile, numbers about 1,000 in Puget Sound, and up to 161,000 along the entire West Coast.

“It’s obvious to us from a biological basis [that] the removal of three to five or even 10 animals will have no biological effect whatsoever,” Scordino said. But with the steelhead, “even one fish is too many. We don’t have the luxury anymore to wait and watch these animals kill steelhead.”

Animal welfare and conservation groups say there are a number of reasons why steelhead and salmon populations are dwindling throughout the Northwest, and the sea lions are being blamed because they are the last, and most obvious, link in the chain.

These factors, they say, include dams, habitat degradation, toxic sediments and fishing. Moreover, they say, killing the sea lions at Ballard could provide a dangerous precedent for making exceptions to the protection of marine mammals that may not solve the problem: The predators, they say, could simply be replaced by other sea lions.