La Jolla’s coastline is being conquered.
Its colonizers have made their home in the seaside neighborhood’s rocks, terraces, beaches and caves. They make their presence known by barking and wailing all day and night. And they absolutely reek.
They’re sea lions — and they’re here to stay.
Unlike harbor seals, which have occupied La Jolla’s Children’s Pool Beach since the 1990s, the sea lions are a newer phenomenon. Sightings stretch back to the early 2000s, but the creatures started pupping — having babies — around Point La Jolla roughly a decade ago.
Since then, a battle has been brewing over to whom La Jolla’s beaches belong. Some longtime locals want the sea lions out, claiming that California’s coast belongs to its people. Activists want increased protection for the sea lions, many of which have died due to human contact.
And over the last few years, a new group has entered the conversation: the rest of the world. As sea lion videos go viral — some cuddly-looking, some giant and combative — busloads of tourists haul in to La Jolla every week, and thousands of others blast their thoughts on social media.
The sea lion presence is a sign of nature recovering — once overhunted mammals growing so large in number that they’re expanding into a habitat that humans have ruled for more than a century.
Experts say La Jolla is just the first beachhead in a larger campaign to claim, or maybe reclaim, territory. As overcrowding and water temperatures disrupt the sea lion population, they say new colonies will form up and down the coast — whether locals want them there or not.
The blubbery beasts have altered La Jolla’s vibe, from a place of placid beach nooks to something feeling a bit more feral and briny, akin to the rugged North Coast. A day on the sand now turns into a timorous dance with a wild animal that might weigh 500 pounds. And sea lions, even the cute smaller ones, pack a brutal bite.
But the first provocation from the neighborhood’s new residents hits you well before you set foot on the shore: the stench.
“This whole place is like a giant toilet,” said Emily Hanson, 9, holding her shirt over her nose while she spoke.
Hanson and her family drove in from Escondido for a day at the beach, but decided to leave early after Emily got a headache from the inescapable odor that blanketed the area.
Besides their natural musk, the sea lions, along with the pelicans and cormorants that roost in the area, poop constantly, and the sun bakes the feces into the rocks and bluffs to the point where you can smell it from blocks away. Some of the cliffs are white with bird guano.
Brockton Villa, a popular brunch and dinner spot, is one of the closest restaurants to the rookery. Its owner, Megan Heine, said they experience the animals with all senses.
“They draw thousands of visitors to the area, which is great for business,” she said. “The smell is not evident inside of our restaurant, but it’s quite pungent at the street level and probably is a deterrent for folks to enjoy the area on some days.”
The city of San Diego tried to fight the smell by spraying microbial foam years ago, but the acrid odor returned.
A group called Citizens for Odor Nuisance Abatement sued the city in 2013, claiming that the smell hurt local businesses.
The suit alleged that Floyd Mayweather and his entourage booked $5,000 worth of rooms at the La Valencia Hotel, which overlooks La Jolla Cove, but left after 15 minutes because of the smell. A judge dismissed the suit.
There’s also the sound: guttural grunts and yelps, a cacophony of barks, screeches, wails and farts.
“The sea lions don’t sleep lol. We thought they would stop barking at one point but they literally bark all night long,” reads a Google review of La Jolla Cove Hotel, which sits just across the street from the colony.
An unlikely colony
From a geographical standpoint, La Jolla seems like a natural landing place for a sea lion colony. The coastline, especially at the pinniped hotspots of Point La Jolla and La Jolla Cove, has gentle waters and sandy beaches with boulders and rock terraces to snooze upon. The surrounding cliffs offer shelter.
Females, especially pregnant ones, don’t have much tolerance for disturbances. Unfortunately, La Jolla, even with the cliffs, offers disturbances aplenty.
While aquariums and zoos separate the humans and animals with cages and barriers, La Jolla’s coast now feels more like a safari, with the two species coexisting, lounging side by side in the sand and swimming together in the waves.
On a foggy Tuesday in October, the creatures put on a constant show: a pair of pups do flips in the water as two females joust over who gets to lie on the biggest rock on the beach. Meanwhile, the alpha male makes his rounds, flopping up and down the cove like a massive inchworm.
Federal law says to stay at least 50 yards away from sea lions, but since the beaches in La Jolla Cove are so small, experts advise a distance of 20 to 30 feet, a guideline that goes largely unheeded.
Someone leans in for a selfie, and others follow. Two staircases descend to the beach, and people crowd onto the steps for a closer view.
A local woman gets in for a swim, and four men in matching American flag button-downs watch in awe as the sea lions swim around her. They start peppering her with questions.
“Is anyone allowed to get in the water?”
“Yeah,” she replies.
“How close are we allowed to get to them?”
“Ask the lifeguard,” she says.
The lifeguard sits in a tower behind gates and tinted glass, heard only by loudspeaker when he shoos a kayaker away from the swim-only zone near the shore.
“Screw it, let’s do it,” one of the men says.
One chugs a Budweiser, and a minute later, they’re running into the water for a closer encounter with the sea lions.
It’s a scene that plays out in different ways throughout the afternoon.
At one point, a sea lion pup, mere months old, awkwardly climbs onto the ledge at the bottom of the stairs and lies down in the sun, taking a respite from the waves. Tourists swarm, pushing phones and cameras inches from the pup’s face.
Carla Pennington, a volunteer with the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club Seal Society, swoops in and stands guard, warning onlookers not to get too close.
“The pups love the stairs, so I just try to make sure everyone keeps their distance,” Pennington said. “This is their home, but obviously we like to come here too. So we have to coexist.”
This summer was a particularly deadly one for the baby sea lions in the cove. Pups are born from late May to early July, and most mothers in the colony give birth over in Point La Jolla, a rocky area that’s completely closed to the public. Four of 44 pups died — a typical mortality rate, said Robyn Davidoff, chair of the Sierra Club Seal Society. But the cove is less protected and more open to the public. Of the nine pups born there, seven died.
“Sea lion babies are like our own babies,” Davidoff said. “They’re extremely vulnerable at birth. They nurse for around a year, they can’t swim at birth, and they can’t eat solid food for about four months.”
Davidoff said the pups died from unintentional human interference: people standing at the tideline and blocking access to land, causing pups to drown, or separating pups when their mothers are out getting food by crowding around them, forming unintentional blockades.
“This is an amazing place, but people are killing pups by loving them to death,” she said.
La Jolla’s new identity
La Jolla’s sea lions — around 250 to 350, according to the Sierra Club Seal Society — make up around only 0.1% of the West Coast’s total population. But their local effect has been huge.
Tourism around the cove has shot up, with visitors staying at hotels touting sea lion views and spending money at local restaurants, coffee shops and boutiques. Specialized tours offer snorkelers and kayakers close-up views of the marine mammals. Gift shops sell sea lion stuffed animals and keychains. A weekend at an Airbnb near the rookery costs $800 up to $3,000.
“I am very concerned that La Jolla is being run for tourists at the locals’ expense,” reader Melinda Merryweather wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribute in August.
For homeowners, the sea lions have become either a welcome amenity or a reason to skip town.
Jay Becker, a real estate agent in La Jolla, said he has had clients move out of the neighborhood because of the foul scent.
“People will have units with outdoor patios or open windows and they don’t want to deal with the smell anymore,” Becker said.
However, he suspected that the smell-sensitive crowd is in the minority, saying that the sea lions probably have helped the housing market more than hurt it.
“Many of the properties I sell are second or third homes for people, and the novelty of the sea lions exceeds the negativity of the smell,” he said.
Becker is listing an oceanfront condo overlooking the coast for $6.5 million. He said the current owners bought the unit partly because of the sea lions, since their seven grandchildren would like them. The unit’s listing description touts their presence as a positive.
“Dolphins and whales playing in the surf, baby sea lions cuddling with their parents … in direct view,” it reads.
Other locals are less enthused.
“They’re a plague,” said Jason Sanders, a homeowner. “This is a beach town, not a zoo.”
Sanders said the smell, the noise and the droves of tourists have altered the community’s identity.
“I’d like to see the city step in and find a way to safely send the sea lions elsewhere,” he said.
Bob Evans serves as president of La Jolla Parks and Beaches, a nonprofit group that has advocated for the city to remove sea lions from La Jolla Cove.
“Our concern is a sea lion takeover,” Evans said. “If it continues, there will be nothing else the city can do but close the beach down entirely.”
“Everyone on social media wants to close our beaches down, and people have called me a vile human for wanting to preserve beach access for people,” he said. “It’s La Jolla vs. the rest of the world, and the rest of the world doesn’t understand what our parks and beaches mean to us.”
In 2023, the San Diego City Council voted to close public access to Point La Jolla year-round. But as more of the coastline closes, officials and wildlife advocates fear an uptick in violence against the animals.
Last September, a sea lion was found with a knife stabbed into its snout in Oxnard. In August, a sea lion was shot dead on Bolsa Chica State Beach.
Population explosion
Once hunted by Native Americans on the Channel Islands, then killed for bounty by fisherman, sea lions have endured a hazardous history on the West Coast. Their comeback coincided with the Marine Mammal Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 1972 making it illegal to hunt, kill or harass certain marine mammals.
The West Coast sea lion population has soared ever since, rising from about 90,000 in the 1970s to about 250,000 today. The vast majority of them breed on two of the Channel Islands: San Nicolas and San Miguel.
But even those, which are largely uninhabited, have run out of space to hold all of California’s sea lions, said Sharon Melin, the lead sea lion biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Melin has spent her entire career tracking California sea lions and said there are two reasons why the creatures are leaving their longtime home of the Channel Islands: food and space.
If there’s not enough food for all the mothers to feed their pups, some will set out to find a new place. And once the pups are born, mothers spend a day or two connecting with them, learning their scent so they know whom to return to after they spend a few days fishing at sea.
To make that connection, they need isolated space alone with their pup. If it’s too crowded, they’ll find someplace else.
As the Channel Islands hit carrying capacity, sea lions have formed small colonies up and down the coast: Año Nuevo State Park, the Farallon Islands and the Big Sur coast. Typically, these are isolated areas free of human contact.
That’s why the La Jolla colony is such a head-scratcher.
Melin suggested the move may have been because of El Niño events and heat waves that warmed waters from 2012 to 2016 or so, shrinking their prey base of fish. The places they choose must have enough space for females to spread out with their pups, but also be close enough to food sources so that mothers can quickly load up on fish and get back to their hungry pups.
Whether La Jolla wants them there or not, it may be too late. Melin said once a breeding colony is established, it’s difficult to stop it.
She said other coastal communities need to be prepared. If a city wants the added boost of tourism, they can learn from San Francisco, which removed boats from Pier 39 and dedicated the slips to sea lions after a group started hauling out there in 1989.
But if cities don’t want the animals and the smells and sounds that come with them, they’ll need to be proactive in stopping it. Legal deterrents include fences, rails, lights and noisemakers.
“As habitats change and the climate changes, sea lions will be moving,” Melin said. “They’ll be looking for places to rear their young, and they’ll show up in places we’ve never thought about.”
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