Sea Lions Suffering Along The Southern California Coast

Something is going on:

Peter Wallerstein realized something was seriously wrong when a sea lion pup turned up seven miles inland at a cellphone store in California.

The number of the starving animals stranded along the southern California coastline has been rising since January, but usually they were just found on beaches. Now they were everywhere. And there were hundreds of them.

And, while the immediate crisis seems to have abated, experts are scratching their heads over what could have caused a tidal wave of sick and malnourished animals over the last two or three months.

“I wasn’t too alarmed in the beginning,” 61-year-old Wallerstein of Marine Animal Rescue, who has been saving the mammals for nearly three decades, told AFP.

“But when the numbers got to be higher, where we’re getting 75 to 100 calls a day and finding animals at the Carson Verizon store and under cars, finding them all over the place, one after another, it kinda put a red flag up.”

Carson, 20 miles south of Los Angeles, lies several miles back from the ocean-front.

“It had to swim miles and miles up the flood control canal, cross a couple of roads, almost get hit by a car. The sheriff’s deputies called me about 11:30 at night, saying ‘Hey, we’ve got a sea lion at the Verizon store’.”

Stranded sea lion pups are nothing unusual in these parts — dozens of them are cared for by rescue centers along the coast every year, when they struggle to forage for themselves after being weaned from their mothers.

But usually rescuers don’t start seeing them until April.

“What happened this year was, we started seeing those pups that should have still been with their mother, showing up as early as January, at six months of age,” said biologist Sharon Melin of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“It has been increasing ever since,” she told AFP from Seattle, adding that there were two main theories — either disease running through the population, or shortage of food, both of which are being investigated.