Animal rescuers are frantic, trying to respond to all the calls coming in from San Diego to the San Francisco areas of the state this year. Sea lion pup strandings are five times higher than normal for the averages usually seen from January to April.
Many of the pups are sick with pneumonia, and some have parasites swarming on their insides. All of them are nothing more than skin and bones, with protruding rib cages. Too weak to move once they are on the beach, they are prey to dogs and well-meaning humans who have no clue in how to help them.
“They come ashore because if they didn’t, they would drown,” Shawn Johnson, the director of veterinary science at Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, told the Times. “They’re just bones and skin. They’re really on the brink of death.”
As was explained in a similar story in Digital Journal, posted on Feb. 14, 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been studying and documenting the erratic variations in the ocean circulation pattern called “El Niño Southern Oscillation,” or more commonly called, “El Niño.”
On March 5, NOAA officially announced 2015 the year of El Nino, projecting it to last from February through the spring and summer. “We’re basically declaring El Niño,” NOAA forecaster Michelle L’Heureux said. “It’s unfortunate we can’t declare a weak El Niño.”
NOAA says El Nino won’t have much of an impact on U.S. weather patterns this year because it is so weak, but this is not boding well for the sea lion pups. Forecasters were alerted to the forming of El Nino after observing a subsurface plume of warm water, called a Kelvin wave, running from west to east across the South Pacific Ocean. El Niño is marked by much warmer waters over the central and eastern parts of this basin, raising the ocean’s water temperatures 0.5°C, or about 1°F, warmer than average.
Things are so bad that SeaWorld San Diego announced last Friday it was canceling its sea lion and sea otters shows for at least two weeks so their trainers could assist in the sea lion rescue operations. “SeaWorld’s entire zoological staff is working tirelessly to save the lives of these emaciated and ill animals. [We] have already rescued more than 400 sea lions in 2015, which is more than twice the number of marine mammal rescues the park would average in a typical year,” the theme park said in a statement last week.
Researchers are now very worried over the long-term consequences of global warming and rising ocean temperatures on the sea lion population. Sea lions have evolved to breed almost exclusively on the Channel Islands over a period of thousands of years, relying on the upswells in the Pacific Ocean to bring them anchovies and sardines, as well as other marine foods.
“The environment is changing too rapidly,” said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service who found that pups on the Channel Islands were 44 percent underweight. “Their life history is so much slower that it’s not keeping up.”
As Michele Hunter, the director of animal care at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center said, “It’s very difficult to see so much death.”
