The starving sea lion pup was so tiny that it looked like a rock at the base of the seaside cliff until it struggled to raise its head as humans approached.
It bleated weakly as volunteer Brennan Slavik eased it into a crate for transport to a rescue center, where it peered from a child’s playpen with woeful eyes made enormous by an emaciated frame.
At almost a year, the pup weighed just 10kg — a third of what it should — and staff quietly took it to a private room, euthanized it and moved on.
Photo: Reuters
It is a scenario playing out daily in California this year, as rescue centers struggle to keep up with hundreds of sick and starving sea lion pups washing up along the coast. More than 1,100 pups have been rescued since January from beaches, but also from inside public restrooms, behind buildings and along railroad tracks.
It is not unusual to have some sea lions wash up each spring as the pups leave their mothers, but so far, the number of stranded babies is five times greater than in 2013, the worst season in recent memory.
“These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end of life. They’re in a crisis ... and not all animals are going to make it,” said Keith Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.
The situation is so bad that Sea World suspended its sea lion show so it can focus on rescue efforts. The theme park has treated 400 pups — more than twice the number it would care for in a typical year — and constructed two temporary pools to house them.
Scientists are not sure what is causing the crisis, but suspect that warmer waters from this winter’s mild El Nino weather pattern are impacting the sea lion birthing grounds along the Channel Islands off the southern California coast.
The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid, sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.
The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.
Sea lions would not normally start showing up in large numbers until April or May, but this year, rescue centers began to get calls in December last year, Matassa said.
For rescue centers like the one in Laguna Beach, that translates into round-the-clock back-breaking work for dozens of volunteers who have arrived from all over the US to help.
The center in one of southern California’s premiere beach communities has rescued more than 213 pups since the beginning of the year and has treated ones that weighed as little as 6kg at eight months old.
On a recent day, in the course of two hours, five suffering animals came into the Pacific Marine Mammal Center.
Harried volunteers moved urgently along a narrow hallway between pens as they unloaded each one, wrapped it in a towel and performed a battery of tests. Most of the animals were so weak they barely resisted.
Those that make the cut are tube-fed a gruel of pureed herring, Pedialyte, vitamins and milk three or four times a day after starting out with a simple broth of hydrating fluids and dextrose.
Those that graduate to whole fish are playfully called “feeders” and those that can once more compete for fish tossed into a pool are called “fighters.”
The goal is to get the pups strong enough to swim free again — but the volunteers who nurse them back to health might never know if they make it in the wild.
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